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Every fifteen minutes the telephone rings. It's Ella from LA, it's Rhea from Rio, it's Merouka from Morocco. I have to break in over their hot cooings to tell them an unappetizing truth: I am not Mark Asprey. He's in New York. I give them my number. They hang up instantly, as if I'm some kind of br…

'I'll be right over,' Keith had said. He now doubleparked outside the Indian Mutiny on Cathcart Road. Seated at his usual table, Keith ate poppadams and bombay duck while the staff fondly prepared his mutton vindaloo. 'The napalm sauce, sir?' asked Rashid. Keith was resolved, in this as in all thin…

In the days after their first meeting, the image of Nicola Six began to work on Keith's mind. It worked like television. He thought of her often — while inspecting a shop window in Oxford Street, while baring after his scattered urges in the last moments before sleep, while finishing himself off wi…

Earlier in the summer, while completing (with infinite pain and difficulty) his entry form for the Duoshare Sparrow Masters, the knockout interpub darts competition in which he was doing so well now, Keith pondered and agonized for several days before filling in the section marked hobbies. He wante…

Every time he pushed open the plywood door, every time Trish came to welcome him on her knees, Keith was that little bit angrier. For this he would give Trish payment. God save us, what was he doing to himself? Why was he here, with her, with that, when he had funloving little Debbee, and sinuous A…