Black Bear

by Aly Monroe

Genres: Thrillers; Spy Thrillers

Synopsis

Book 4 in the Peter Cotton spy thriller series, for fans of John le Carré and Robert Harris. Praise for Aly Monroe 'Monroe creates the atmosphere of the time brilliantly . . . I was gripped from start to finish' Literary Review 'Riveting stuff' The Times Sent to Manhattan as part of the British effort to build intelligence into the new United Nations Organisation 'from the foundations up', Agent Peter Cotton wakes up in the Ogden Clinic on East 76th Street, a private facility reserved for very special patients and veterans. He is told he was found badly bruised, slumped in a doorway, and that he had been injected with at least three 'truth-drugs'. He is lucky to be alive. Plagued by vertigo, colour blindness and tunnel vision, and unable to be certain what is real and what hallucinatory, Cotton must piece together what has happened to him, find out who is responsible and why. What he discovers is even more unsettling. His biggest uncertainty? Why he has been allowed to live. The Peter Cotton spy thriller series: Book 1: The Maze of Cadiz Book 2: Washington Shadow Book 3: Icelight Book 2: Black Bear Short story: Redeemable

Release date: May 9, 2013

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 480

Sample

‘Confirms Aly Monroe’s genius for creating such tension that, while nothing much happens, you don’t want things to stop not happening. She’s commercial writing’s rarest beast – a gloriously defiant individualist’

Daily Telegraph

‘Monroe is terrific at evoking this world’

Guardian

‘Monroe creates the atmosphere of the time brilliantly … an original novel and its people and places are so well described that I was gripped from start to finish’

Literary Review

‘Riveting stuff’

The Times

‘The Peter Cotton series by Aly Monroe is proving to be absolutely unmissable and her protagonist a truly fascinating creation’

Good Book Guide

‘Monroe’s research is spot on and she paints her supporting cast with so many shades of grey that it makes a John le Carré novel look positively straightforward. This is wonderfully atmospheric’

Shots Magazine

‘The Peter Cotton series is getting better and better, and in Icelight the internecine squabbling of the security services is a prequel to the real-life problems during the Cold War. I’m really looking forward to the next book’

Crime Scraps

‘A wonderfully atmospheric book’

Euro Crime

‘Dodgy underhand dealings, political manipulations as well as a labyrinth of twists and turns … Definitely an author to watch’

Falcata Times

‘Wonderfully atmospheric … Excellent’

Guardian

‘A Graham Greene anti-hero … Cotton [is] the spy who brings the cold in with him … The deliberate anticlimax is a bold and broadly justified gesture of confidence in the power of [Monroe’s] sense of time, place and character to charm the reader into a story told entirely on her own terms’

Daily Telegraph

‘Monroe’s novels are a very enjoyable, historically educated combination of espionage fiction’s traditionally opaque plots with unexpected characters and effervescent dialogue’

Morning Star

‘The story is told with such subtlety that following it requires concentration on tiny hints, but it’s worth the effort because the atmosphere of the time and place is so vividly evoked’

Literary Review

‘A suitably evocative period atmosphere, some really imaginative character portraits and a well-researched plot which successfully weaves real-life events into the fictional story, making it such an interesting read that I am looking forward to the next chapter in Peter Cotton’s career’

Euro Crime

‘Splendid … Monroe provides terrific and convincing historical atmosphere; I am delighted that she is writing more Peter Cotton novels’

The Times

‘Aly Monroe has created an impressive novel with an extraordinary, dream-like atmosphere … The next can’t come too soon’

Financial Times

‘Cotton’s investigating is clever and fascinating’

Guardian

‘Hugely atmospheric … Addictive’

Sunday Telegraph

‘[Monroe’s] writing is skilful and evocative … a stylish and impressive debut’

The Economist

‘Hugely accomplished … Monroe is a natural storyteller, conjuring up a cracking atmosphere, and she knows how to create first-rate characters’

Mail on Sunday

‘Monroe’s descriptions of post-civil-war Spanish society … are skilfully drawn, but what really impressed me was her confident economical portrayal of character, particularly Cotton’s. It reminded me of Graham Greene – high praise for a first novel’

Guardian

‘There’s more than a touch of Eric Ambler in this novel … As in all the best espionage stories, the personal and the political are inextricably entangled’

The Spectator

‘A wonderfully atmospheric book, which not only illuminates the shadowy world of espionage but brilliantly evokes a Spain shattered by Civil War, shortages and poverty, and ruled by a Fascist dictator. So convincing is the portrait painted here that it is clear that Ms Monroe knows her Spain and her Spanish history, as well as some cunningly violent bits of agent “tradecraft” including the deft use of a hat-pin! … This is so well-written I have real trouble believing it is a first novel’

Euro Crime

COTTON HAD no grasp of where he was and no notion of how he had got there. He could not even tell whether his eyes were shut or he was trapped somewhere dark enough to make no difference. What he did begin to feel was a very heavy weight pressing on the right side of his head. It felt flat, like the flange of a sizeable I-beam. It was squeezing his skull.

The few words of response that came to his mind were slow and insecure, as if they were not certain what form they should take, however simple. Though he had not moved, the pain in his head abruptly shifted, became something bulb-shaped pulsing at the base of his neck. His tongue felt dry as if it had not moved for a long time. His mind appeared to have whole sections missing, and what was left, apart from a few sparks of alarm, was as lively as dried, old dregs.

‘Have I been in a – have I been in an—?’

The letters that came to him formed accent. He winced, partly at the excruciating pain in his head. He meant accident. He knew the word. But he could not see how to get at it. With each throb the pain wiped part of it out.

Cotton had regained consciousness before. As a child of about eight at the dentist he had been given gas for the extraction of a milk tooth. And about fifteen years later, in Sicily, after the shock wave from an explosion had flung him against a jeep. From both he remembered a light spinning sensation before he recovered his senses. They had all come back in a bright rush – not like this. As if on cue, his mind saw a spin of blue sky and white clouds, but the wrong way round. He was leaving them, dropping back not rising up. The clouds fractured and turned black.

Cotton slumped into unconsciousness again.

‘Can you hear me? Colonel Cotton? Can you hear me?’

Cotton tried to answer but he heard a sound he did not recognize as anything to do with his intent to say ‘yes’. He was not sure he had really managed to speak, only that something like a moan had reverberated in his skull. The bones in his head felt brittle and light, somewhere between dried-out honeycomb and crumbling leaves. The image made him feel like retching.

‘How are you feeling?’ said the voice. The voice was American and male. There was nothing at all familiar about it. Cotton could not understand the question. He could not get a grip on it. He recognized the words but could not run them together to make sense. Though his heart was already beating very fast, he felt it quicken. He could barely breathe.

‘Can you hear me, sir?’ the voice repeated.

Cotton made a big effort. ‘Yes,’ he said. This sounded to him more like a growl than a word.

‘Good. Good.’ The man was speaking very slowly and carefully. ‘Tell me now. How are you feeling?’

Cotton didn’t know what to say. He could not get past the pain and the nausea.

‘I guess you’re feeling pretty rough,’ suggested the voice.

Cotton tried again. ‘Have I been in a crash?’ He sounded to himself like a profoundly deaf person speaking.

‘Is that what you think?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘You’re having problems remembering.’

‘Yes.’

‘What can you remember, sir?’

‘I’ve been unconscious. Haven’t I?’

‘In a manner of speaking.’

Cotton considered the man’s reply. None of this made any sense. He could remember nothing. He could find nothing to remember.

‘Is there a problem?’ said the voice.

‘I’m thinking.’

But the truth was Cotton wasn’t thinking much at all. His mind felt gruesomely tenderized, but he had no recall of the blows that had tenderized it.

Somebody he could not identify had once said to him, ‘Are you actually capable of panic?’

‘I was always taught panic was of no use,’ he had replied. ‘You have to think. There are times you can think pretty fast.’

Cotton couldn’t move and he couldn’t see. And, despite his scudding pulse, he could barely think. Was he blind? Paralysed?

He breathed in as deeply as he could. From somewhere in the dark he recalled, as a very small child, looking over the top of his cot as his Mexican nanny approached. She was smiling and talking to him but he could not hear what she was saying. In his mind, he held up his arms to be lifted.

‘What are you doing?’ said the voice.

‘Remembering something,’ he said.

‘Of what happened to you?’

‘Long ago.’

‘That’s good too,’ said the voice. ‘I mean it. That’ll do. Can you tell me about it?’

Cotton felt another wave of nausea. ‘Am I blind?’ he said.

‘No, you have a cover over your eyes to protect them. You may be having acute problems with your sense of balance. You have to trust me, Colonel Cotton. I need your collaboration. Try to keep talking. Tell me about the memory you just had. Is it still there? Can you recall it?’

Cotton understood the bit about balance. He thought about landing craft yawing in a swell. But that wasn’t right. This was worse; a sensation that he was on the verge of falling out of the space that contained him. The space was egg-shaped but the egg was fragile. He recalled someone telling him an egg was the most efficient aerodynamic shape. He had no idea if that was true, nor what good it did him. This shape was prone to shifts and lurches.

The more he engaged with the voice the more conscious he became of how many separate bits of him hurt. His joints, for example, felt as if somebody had gone mad with a small, shiny hammer, the kind doctors use to test reflexes but had used like a weapon on him. Had he been badly burnt? ‘Something when I was very young, that’s all.’

‘Tell me.’

‘It’s before I can even speak. I’m watching my ama come to pick me up out of the cot.’

‘Ama? What’s that word?’

‘Nurse,’ said Cotton. ‘Nanny. In Mexico.’

‘Can you recall her name?’

‘Consuelo.’

‘Right,’ said the voice. Cotton was aware the speaker had turned his head towards someone else. ‘That makes sense, right? Consuelo means “consolation”. Isn’t that the case?’

Almost instantly Cotton felt a surge of utter distress, as if he had just received the most heartbreaking news possible – but all from the notion that the other man was misunderstanding. It wasn’t the translation of Consuelo’s name that mattered; it was Consuelo herself. Why was he so abject and alarmed that he might be misleading a doctor?

‘It’s quite a common name.’

‘Oh, I’m sure it is. I’m not doubting that, Colonel Cotton. Not at all.’

Cotton confirmed the man was calling him by his old rank. ‘Who am I speaking to?’

‘My name is Dr Sanford.’

‘Are you a proper doctor?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘You’re not a psychiatrist?’

‘No, I’m not,’ said Dr Sanford. ‘Are you telling me you’ve had a bad experience?’

‘Not me.’ Cotton thought he was falling asleep again, but he was prevented from doing so by someone speaking. It took him some time to appreciate that the fluent, peremptory, sneering voice he was hearing was coming from him.

‘But it was quite exceptionally difficult to avoid an impression of the psychiatrists involved in our war effort as combining the qualities of both Uriah Heep and Torquemada. The abject alacrity with which they kowtowed to funding and authority was most striking. Almost as much as the speed with which they dispatched the soldiers they were supposed to be helping. Is “shirker” a recognized term in psychiatry? I once saw one of these people call a sergeant that. The man had no skin on his lower legs but presumably the psychiatrist couldn’t look down past the table he was sitting behind.’

Dr Sanford laughed. ‘Well now! Where did that come from?’ he said.

Cotton had no idea. It had been like listening to someone else, a bitter, vindictive someone else – like the second master at his old school, who insisted on being addressed as padre. Or possibly, it seemed to Cotton, like a certain kind of interrogator.

‘Let me reassure you, Colonel Cotton. You have no need to worry. I’m a physician, a neurologist. Are you in a position right now to know what that means?’

‘You deal with epilepsy, Parkinson’s, cerebral palsy …’

‘None of those is your case, Colonel. But I’m sure you know that sometimes we have to use symptoms to trace back. This conversation is in the nature of an investigation.’

‘Of what?’

‘Your condition. Right now your eyes are covered because light is extremely painful for you. Do you remember that? It’s not too strong to say you were in agony. You said it was like having rusty hat pins stuck into your eyes.’

Rusty hat pins? It seemed a bizarre, far-fetched simile to Cotton. ‘I don’t remember.’ Immediately, however, Cotton felt himself cringe. He felt frightened of having the surface of his eyes scratched by flecks of rust. The flecks floated in the liquid between his lids and his eyeballs, and the damned things were spinning, rather leisurely, like blotched, metallic sores. What the hell was the matter with him? Why was he worried about rust when a hat pin in his eyeball would certainly have blinded and very likely killed him directly? Where was his sense of depth?

‘That’s why I am asking you about memories,’ continued the doctor. ‘We want to see how much you can join up, as it were.’

‘Are you telling me I’m brain-damaged?’

‘Honestly? We don’t know yet. But you are doing extraordinarily well so far, let me assure you.’

‘Was I in an acci—?’ It wasn’t that Cotton couldn’t say the word; he couldn’t even find it.

‘An accident? You were found unconscious in a doorway in Centre Street, about a block down from Police Headquarters.’

‘Where’s that?’

‘Little Italy.’

Cotton heard ‘Lillillily’. ‘Lill—?’

‘Colonel Cotton! Colonel Cotton!’

Cotton came back with a grunt of protest. ‘What?’

‘Italy,’ said the doctor. ‘You were found in Little Italy. New York. Have you got that?’

‘Yes.’

‘Good. You were found in a doorway. When I saw you for the first time you were having convulsions. We didn’t have an easy time. At one stage you went into shock.’

‘What is wrong with me?’

‘You’ve had an influx of drugs in your system, Colonel. We are pretty sure we know what the main drugs were but we don’t quite know how much you got.’

‘What are you saying?’

‘Well, for example, we found substantial traces of scopolamine in your blood. And there was mescaline in your urine.’

Cotton heard the words but they vanished immediately. ‘Say those again.’

‘All right. You may have heard of mescaline. Or perhaps you’ve heard of peyote? Oh, that has a link with Mexico, doesn’t it? Peyote’s another word for mescaline.’

‘Yes.’

‘Tell me.’

‘Peyote. It’s a hallucinogenic.’

‘It doesn’t cause what we would call true hallucinations.’

‘I see. More like symphonies and harmonies, an intense feeling of oneness with the colour and petals of a rose?’ It was that sarcastic voice again. It made Cotton feel sick, as if he had swallowed a ventriloquist’s act and couldn’t get rid of it.

‘That’s correct,’ said Dr Sanford. ‘And how about nightshade? Scopolamine is derived from nightshade.’

‘Deadly?’

‘There are variations and non-lethal doses. We suspect you’ve also had sodium amytal, but that is harder to sort out from other barbiturates. Do you know what that is?’

To his own surprise Cotton heard himself speak, quietly, as himself. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘The Germans invented it. They wanted it to be a truth drug.’

‘Good. What we are doing is clearing you out. I’m afraid this has meant more drugs. And we’ve been monitoring your heart and, in particular, your kidneys. That’s the physical side. On your mind we are less able to work because we can’t monitor it so well. Do you understand what I am saying? I need your help. We need to communicate.’

‘Right,’ said Cotton. ‘I feel tied down.’

‘You are,’ said Dr Sanford’s voice. ‘You’ve had convulsions. Do you remember I said that? They were violent but we got them down in intensity and frequency and in the last twenty-four hours you’ve had no attacks whatsoever. I assure you, however, that even three days ago, they were still violent enough to cause you quite severe injury. We had to ensure you didn’t bite your tongue. But we’ve been reducing the sedation and you really are holding up pretty well.’

‘I don’t remember any convulsions.’

‘That’s not a problem. I wouldn’t expect you to remember any. OK?’

‘No,’ said Cotton. He sighed. ‘Mierda.’

‘You remember Spanish?’

‘I think so.’

‘Say something.’

‘Estoy jodido.’

‘What does that mean?’

Cotton felt enormously tired, as if each word he had spoken had been bruising his brain and he simply had no more space left for any more bruises. He could see a kind of kaleidoscopic fracturing of colours under his eyelids. These broken bits began to spin and melt into a single colour. It was a repulsive shade of urine and tangerine.

‘He’s screwed,’ said another American voice, one that Cotton had not heard. ‘He says he’s screwed.’

If he had been able to, Cotton would have nodded. The translation was just right enough. He passed out again on a feeling almost like relief.

COTTON WAS woken by tugging. The tugging turned into twitching. He felt himself start, as if he had been given a small electrical shock.

‘What’s the date?’ he said.

‘Oh, my,’ said an American female voice. ‘He’s awake. Get Dr Sanford, would you?’

‘What’s the date?’

‘Wednesday, June 18, 1947,’ said the woman. ‘I am sorry, sir. Did we hurt you with the drip?’

Cotton was sure this meant something but was not at all clear what.

‘How long? How long have I been here?’

‘Colonel Cotton, you’ve been here for thirteen days. You weren’t really supposed to wake up properly until tomorrow.’

Cotton did not know what to say to this. That was nearly two weeks, a fortnight. He tried to count. That took him back to the 5th of June, which still did not mean anything. He heard the door open.

‘Well now! How are you feeling today?’ said Dr Sanford.

Cotton felt relief. He understood the question.

‘In less pain,’ he said. ‘Confused. Or ignorant.’

Dr Sanford laughed. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘You’re reacting well! I am going to check your pulse. Is that OK?’

‘Yes,’ said Cotton. He felt something vague on his wrist. He presumed he should translate the feeling into seeing the doctor’s fingers. He waited. He saw nothing.

‘Seventy-five,’ said Dr Sanford. ‘What were you before?’

‘Lower,’ said Cotton. ‘About sixty.’

‘Oh, seventy-five is acceptable for now, let me tell you.’

‘I can’t smell.’

‘Right. You’re very likely dehydrated. We’ll tackle that. How’s your sense of touch?’

‘Dull. Distant but with twitches.’

‘OK. Hearing?’

‘That’s relatively sharp. At least, I think it is.’

In the dark, Cotton understood he was waiting to ‘jump’ back into himself. But he could not. He could not raise a sense of a self to jump back into. He had no impression of a flood of memories waiting to be summoned up. In Sicily, though injured, he had had adrenalin to help him react. Here there was nothing. He still had no idea how he had got there, could recall nothing of the last weeks. He was clear that he was in the US but could not even remember how he had arrived there. He decided on a plane, but could find no detail to back the decision. He added engine drone, tried to look around the cabin, but started getting that tunnel vision again. He did not mean that. He was looking down a tube and the tube was tightening.

‘I don’t know,’ he said.

‘Yes, Colonel Cotton. That’s why I am here.’

‘I don’t know what I am.’

There was a pause. He could hear a pen moving quickly on paper. Then another male voice spoke.

‘Hell,’ it drawled. ‘Does this stuff turn them metaphysical?’

There was a noise Cotton somehow heard as sneezing. Dr Sanford did not approve of the interruption. Cotton had heard the other voice before but wasn’t sure when.

‘Where do you want to start?’ said Dr Sanford.

Cotton’s skin had started to prickle. He was not sure if he was cold or was trying to sweat.

‘My name is Peter Cotton.’

‘Right! Where do you live?’

‘Wilbraham Place.’

‘OK. Where’s that?’

‘Off Sloane Street.’

‘You’re not talking of New York.’

‘London.’

‘Where do you live here? In Manhattan?’

Cotton waited. Nothing whatsoever occurred to him. He couldn’t recall a door or a window, let alone a building or a number.

‘Don’t worry, Colonel Cotton. You’re going to find you have acute recent or short-term memory loss.’

‘Lagunas,’ said Cotton.

‘What’s that?’

‘Lagoons. Roundish empty things.’

He heard someone write.

‘We say “lacunae”,’ said Sanford. ‘But I think you’ll find the emptiness a little more consistent than just gaps. How old are you?’

‘I’m twenty-eight.’

‘Can you remember your birth date?’

‘Yes. I was born on 20th February 1919.’

‘Good. Are you married?’

Up to now Cotton had been able to answer promptly, without thinking. Now he frowned. Embarrassed, he could only see a few trite curves of female flesh held by some very thin, gauzy material. ‘No, I’m not.’

‘Why do you pause?’

‘I was engaged. I’ve been engaged. First to Emmeline Gilbert, then to Katherine Ward. Emmeline died in a bombing raid in 1943. Katherine died in a motor car accident in 1945.’

Dr Sanford’s voice turned grave. ‘Colonel Cotton. Are you quite sure about that?’

Cotton wondered. ‘Yes,’ he decided. What he found dispiriting and absurd was that he could recall neither Emmeline’s nor Katherine’s face – each had been reduced to a blank with one simplified feature; eyes for Emmeline, lips for Katherine. He couldn’t put the faces in profile. To his shame, both women resembled round balloons defined by a single projection. These balloons were drifting past him. Cotton had never been tearful, but here again he could have wept. A moment later, he saw the balloons had burst and that their insides were flecked with spittle.

‘Oh, not fucking slobber,’ he said. He had no idea what he meant but somehow it fitted his suspicion that he would have to build up his memory out of small, childishly simple tokens.

‘Colonel?’ said Dr Sanford. ‘You just keep going, all right? There’s no pressure. You take your time. Can you remember arriving in the US?’

‘No.’

‘All right. Would you know why you came to the US?’

‘For the United Nations.’

Cotton remembered something here all right, somebody saying, ‘We want Intelligence mixed in with the fucking cement. We want Intelligence in there from the foundations up.’

‘Yes, for the United Nations.’

‘Right! So were you at the Sperry plant? At Lake Success?’ This meant nothing to Cotton. ‘You do know the old gyroscope plant is the organization’s temporary headquarters?’

‘I don’t know what you’re talking about.’

‘OK. Let’s see. Do you know if you are based in Long Island or Manhattan?’

‘Manhattan,’ said Cotton. ‘I think. Wait. East River? Turtle Bay?’

‘That’s where the building will be.’

‘Right,’ said Cotton. He sighed. He had thought the building was there already. He looked for something he definitely did know. ‘I have a sister. She lives in Manhattan and Long Island. Joan and her husband have a large house on Centre Island, overlooking Oyster Bay.’

‘Can you tell me more about her?’

‘Yes. She married an American called Todd Buchanan. They have three children. Emily, Halliday and Foster.’

‘Good. What about your parents?’

‘What?’ This was ghastly, like one of those dreams in which you are bereft of answers. ‘I think my mother’s dead.’

‘You think?’

Cotton waited. All he could manage was a miserable lack, expressed as a draining, almost sucking sensation, of where his mother should have been. Again he had to resist a powerful urge to weep.

‘I’m sure.’

‘Your father?’

‘I don’t think he’s dead.’

‘You’re not certain?’

‘No,’ said Cotton. ‘He’s not dead. But he has a heart condition.’

‘OK,’ said Dr Sanford. ‘Am I right? Would you prefer to stop for now?’

‘Yes,’ said Cotton. ‘I think I would.’

The doctor had said short-term memory loss. Not remembering whether his parents were alive or dead didn’t strike Cotton as being other than miserably and thoroughly confused. It made him feel wretched and guilty. He breathed in and, even though his eyes were covered, he squeezed them shut.

‘Colonel Cotton, you’ve had a cocktail of drugs. You do understand that?’

‘A cocktail? What do you mean? Like a Manhattan?’

He heard the smile in Dr Sanford’s voice. ‘Make that a brandy Manhattan and mix it with a Death in the Afternoon, that’s absinthe and champagne, and then add … I don’t know, a—’

‘Chupacabra?’ Cotton offered.

‘Good,’ said Dr Sanford. ‘This is remarkably positive, Colonel Cotton. What is a chupacabra?’

‘I really have no idea,’ said Cotton. ‘It’s got tequila in it, certainly, but after that … perhaps some Tabasco sauce?’

‘I meant the creature.’

‘That’s just a mythical bloodsucker, a kind of vampire, I suppose. No charm or garlic, though. It’s an animal.’

‘Did you pick that for any reason?’

‘I don’t follow.’

‘Are you conscious of nightmares you’ve had? A sensation of invasion? Possibly being the victim of something akin to a vampire?’

‘No,’ said Cotton. ‘I don’t remember anything like that. I can hardly remember cocktail names. I don’t drink them.’

‘OK. You can recall nothing of what’s happened to you? It’s just a blank.’

‘It’s a dark blank,’ said Cotton. ‘Sometimes I get – I don’t know – volcanic colours, and egg yolks and stained glass. When will you uncover my eyes?’

‘Not yet,’ said Dr Sanford. ‘Let me tell you why. I want you to understand more of what you’ve been through. Do you remember I told you something of scopolamine?’

‘Scopolamine,’ said Cotton. He was pleased he could say the word. And something stirred. ‘Isn’t that used to combat travel sickness?’

‘Yes!’ said the doctor. ‘Though that’s only one of its uses. I also told you about mescaline.’

‘Yes,’ said Cotton. ‘It can cause hallucinations, or at least very heightened perceptions.’

‘Good. How about sodium amytal?’

‘It’s a barbiturate. Some people believe it’s a truth drug.’

‘Excellent. Colonel, you’ve had a cocktail of all these drugs. Do you understand what I am saying? You’ve been used – though I don’t want to alarm you or be overly dramatic – as a kind of human cocktail shaker.’

Cotton felt no alarm whatsoever. ‘Are you saying this is a hangover?’

‘OK,’ said Dr Sanford. ‘Something like that. But rather more. You’ve got more than a headache.’

‘Right,’ said Cotton. ‘I’m confused.’ Something had snagged in Cotton’s mind. It did not make obvious sense.

‘Go on, go on.’

‘I remember, at least I think I do, that John Maynard Keynes was on sodium amytal in late 1945, a few months before he died. In Washington he would put ice packs over his heart and take capsules of sodium amytal.’

‘Oh, that’s wonderful,’ said Dr Sanford. ‘You see, Colonel, our problem is about the scale of things; the dose, if you like, and the very different reactions of different people in different conditions. Lord Keynes was prescribed sodium amytal in an effort to keep his heart rate up.’

Cotton wasn’t sure. He remembered his own heartbeat had certainly been fast enough to blur the pulse. He heard himself emit a kind of giggle. ‘It didn’t work on Keynes as a truth drug now, did it?’

‘It wasn’t meant to,’ said Dr Sanford. ‘Keynes would have taken capsules, you see, with a period of action of about forty to forty-five minutes. You’ve a grand heart, Colonel, but I did have to take action to slow it down.’ There was a slight pause. ‘You were injected. Directly into the vein. In very much larger quantities. Lord Keynes’ capsules were used to sustain an old life a little longer. In your case, as a fit young man, your physical and psychological integrity was placed under very considerable strain by this cocktail.’

There was a pause. Cotton registered the words well enough but the significance of them escaped him. For the first time he had a suspicion this lack of understanding was partly his decision.

‘Tell me about my eyes,’ he said.

‘Then we’re talking mostly about scopolamine. It’s fairly commonly used, in very small doses, by ophthalmologists, usually to dilate the pupil or to paralyse the eye-focusing muscle. Both are useful, of course, in the treatment of disorders of the eye. It can also be used, as you’ve said, to quell travel or motion sickness. That is a tiny dose. The dosage is, however, absolutely critical. During the war, never under ideal circumstances, a number of mistakes were made. They gave scopolamine to paratroopers on D-Day and the dose was large enough to put a few of them out of action. I mean by that that they were unable to jump with any guarantee they knew what they were doing. A couple lost eve