A tall, bulky man with a Saddam moustache emerged from an inner office and walked over with his hand stuck out for Tom to shake.

‘Bruce Allway? Tom Patrick, NTSB. We spoke?’

Allway’s office smelt newly carpeted, although Tom noticed that the carpet was old and unravelling a little round the edges. Maybe it was a spray – like that new-car smell. Tom toyed for a moment with the concept of a world where nothing was ever renewed or replaced, just sprayed to make it smell as if it had been.

Allway could have done with a spray to clear his desk. Papers and folders spilled across it in thick, uneven piles; Day-Glo notes stuck seemingly randomly to things; an ironic desk-tidy overflowing with pens festooned with rubber bands.

‘’Scuse the mess,’ said Allway, with a hopeless shrug that seemed to indicate that if Tom had come on any other day things would have been pretty much the same. He held up a grey folder. ‘Found what you’re looking for.’

‘Really?’ said Tom, in genuine amazement.

*

Tom read the file in the debris of his Denny’s lunch. The Pride of Maine had gone into service with Avia Freight from new. Avia was a major cargo player, and the maintenance records were what he’d expected – regular and comprehensive. Every nut and bolt that had been checked or replaced on the 737 had been logged. Tom ran his poker glance down the pages, looking for information about the number-two engine. Nothing. According to the records, the compressor fan disc was the one the Pride of Maine had been born with, and the engine had been properly maintained up to the point of sale. No connection with the South African jet. If something had gone wrong with the fan disc, it was nothing to do with Avia.

Back to square one. Now he’d have to go back to the chirpy sonofabitch at CalSuperior and go through their maintenance records with a fine-tooth comb as well.

He sighed. He ran his hand across the stubble on his chin and felt a rare pang of embarrassment that he’d forgotten to shave. It was quickly subsumed by the more familiar burn of frustration at the way his career was trickling away, like sand in an hourglass.

He’d accepted Boise without a murmur. He knew Pete was pissed at him for the early-hours call, so he’d gone to Idaho and done the job with his usual thoroughness. But he’d also known he couldn’t go on like that indefinitely, poking around oil waste pipes and mucky fuel tanks looking for clues while his heart was in the sky and his head was up his ass. Sooner or later it would break him, and right now he figured on sooner.

How long would it be before Pete let him back in?

Tom knew he’d fucked up. His brain was a scientific wonder but his mouth belonged to a knee-jerk teenager who’d been left alone in his parents’ house for the weekend with only sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll for company. Not for the first time, Tom wondered when – if – his big mouth would ever be wholly under his control. He wasn’t about to hold his breath.

And, if that were the case, shouldn’t he just get out now? Why hang around up to his armpits in toxic sludge, waiting for each humiliation to be over just so the next one could begin?

He looked down at the file that the by-then-slightly-less-hostile actress-slash-clerk had copied for him.

A wave of self-loathing swept him up. He knew why he was helping Halo Jackson. He might have been kick-started by Chris Stern’s young widow and her daughter, but he needed to find out what had happened to the Pride of Maine because he needed to show that he could still do the job he loved – even if it was after the event and unofficial and made no goddamn difference. He realized he was holding on to his old life by this one slender thread, and if it snapped, he was lost, cast adrift on a sea of failure and leaking pipes, dead fish and pollution.

And so the waves of self-loathing deposit me on the shores of self-pity, he thought wryly, and grinned at himself. What a fucking loser. No wonder Ella’d run a mile.

‘More coffee, sweetheart?’ The waitress, a harassed woman in her forties, saw his grin and took time out from her shitty job to smile back at him before passing on to the next booth. Tom gathered his papers, got up and dropped a good tip on the table.

His phone rang and Ness’s name came up on the display.

‘Hello?’

‘Hi, Tom.’

Her voice alone made his heart bump.

‘Want to play some cards?’

*

She met him at the Bicycle Club, looking spectacular in a clingy green dress. But he figured she’d look that way in pretty much anything. Her glossy hair was tamed into a small clip at the nape of her neck, leaving delicious tendrils to escape across her milky skin.

She handed him two rolls of cash. ‘Change them up one at a time. They draw less attention that way.’ She reached up and he thought for one dizzying second that she was going to stroke his cheek, but her hand moved round to the back of his head and then he felt her fingers press gently into the hollow at the nape of his neck. ‘When I touch your neck like so, it’s over, okay?’ He nodded silently, not trusting his voice. ‘There’s a doughnut shop down the strip. I’ll meet you there.’

They went to the floor man’s pulpit-like plinth and he asked for a fifteen-thirty table.

‘Number thirty-two.’ The man indicated it with a jerk of his head.

Tom started towards it, but Ness put a hand on his arm and shook her head at the floor man. ‘What else have you got?’

He stood and craned so he could check out the tables. ‘Forty-one?’

This time Tom stood and waited while Ness scanned it. ‘Know anyone?’ she asked.

‘No.’

She nodded briefly and they walked through the room. ‘What was wrong with thirty-two?’ he asked.

‘Two to the dealer’s left is a Chinese man in a red shirt. He plays for the Triads. We try not to step on each other’s toes.’

The phrase ‘honour among thieves’ sprang to Tom’s mind, and he pushed it away, suddenly feeling awkwardly like a thief himself. The enormity of what he was about to do made him falter. A beautiful woman had appealed to his ego and he was about to make the leap from law-abiding citizen to money-launderer.

He hadn’t thought about it in such bald terms before. It had all happened so fast. He’d been dazzled by Ness, and by the idea of playing with big money – a real high roller. But now he was about to become a very small cog in a piece of illegal machinery.

He stopped – uncertain.

Ness reached table forty-one and turned to him, raising her eyebrows questioningly. When he didn’t move, she came back over. ‘First-night nerves, Tom?’

‘Yeah. I guess.’

‘Only the good guys get them.’ She smiled.

‘I’m not the first?’

‘Nope, but you’re one of the few. I like a man who takes things seriously.’

He nodded and she waited, but he still didn’t move. The dealer at forty-one glanced up to see where his ninth man was and Ness gave him a holding wave.

She gave Tom another moment, then leaned in close, so that he could smell her skin. ‘All you’re doing is playing cards, Tom. Nothing more. Using your talent to make a living.’

She made it sound like the American dream. And who knew? If his career didn’t get back on track soon, he would need something just to pay his rent. Poker and planes were all he had.

He followed her to table forty-one.

It was close to the centre of the room. As they approached, Tom was already sizing up the opposition. He had never sat at a big-stakes table – all his big stakes had been with cheaply bought tournament chips – but table forty-one summed up one of the things Tom loved about card clubs. Any one of these players could have taken their place at a lowly one-two table without a second glance from their opponents. Even though they were playing a high-stakes game, they looked no different from any other player in the place.

Tom took a seat opposite the dealer. To his left were a slender Latino in a loose-fitting suit, then a bottle-blonde fifty-year-old, with gold on each finger and dripping from her ears, an emaciated black man with grizzled hair and beard, two middle-aged men with bulging waistlines – one in a sports coat and the other in a club jacket that read ‘Normandie – Five Card Stud’. On his right were a slim, unshaven white man in a net cap and with dirt under his long fingernails, a good-looking dark-haired woman in her thirties, and a skinny Chinese man who could have been thirty or fifty.

The dealer was a portly Latino with a Zapata moustache and a bored expression in his small dark eyes.

It was only when Tom changed one of the rolls of money for chips that he knew it contained ten thousand dollars. He felt suddenly ill. Intellectually, he’d known that he wouldn’t be playing for peanuts, but the thought of losing ten thousand dollars of someone else’s money – especially when that someone else might not be firmly bound by the law of the land – made his guts clench. If the other roll contained what this one had, then they – whoever ‘they’ were – must be prepared to lose twenty thousand in the experiment to see whether he was worth ‘employing’. He hoped that people who could throw that kind of money away on an experiment wouldn’t bother killing him for losing it. But he could only hope that. He couldn’t know it unless – until – that happened.