He hesitated, brought to the brink, then shook his head. He looked up at me and I knew I was going to have to do it. I lowered my head and forced myself to remember Louise's body, opened from throat to groin on the auto-surgeon's table with her internal organs arranged in dishes around her head like appetisers. I remembered the copper-skinned woman I had been in the stifling loft space, the grip of the tape as they pinned me to the naked wooden floor, the shrill dinning of agony behind my temples as they mutilated my flesh. The screaming and the two men who had drunk it in like perfume.