Dunbar tried to shake off the latest scrap of disjointed narrative that had taken over his mind like a hallucination, but he had been alone for too long and was now adrift in a compulsory daydream whose images were experts on what he did not want to feel and would rather not imagine. He had just seen an old circus tiger escape from its cage in a cold country and amble bemusedly through a crowd of screaming, fleeing citizens. He had felt the power of its alien gait and then, when it was standing on the edge of a sparse recreational wood where it had gone to look for food, he had seen a bullet crash into its skull in a scatter of blood and bone.

How could he wake from a waking dream? It enveloped everything he thought and everything he looked at. The broken layer of brown and purple cloud scattered in the yellowing sky reminded him of his mother’s tortoiseshell comb when he used to close one eye and hold it up to the lamplight and stare at it for ages, until its mottled pattern of light and dark patches filled the whole visual field. That was when he was very little, before he started asking her difficult questions and questioning her easy answers, before they became opponents. Now everyone was his opponent, because he was not in his right mind.

The hills, drenched by the storm, were gleaming and dripping in the afternoon light. How tactless of him to have insisted on bringing his lumbering body to this lovely, liquid scene, to dump it like a sack of cement, split open and hardened by rain, on this otherwise uncontaminated hillside.

On the other hand, he felt such a sense of lightness and of hunger, such a threadbare connection to the rest of human life, that he could easily imagine slipping out of existence, as quietly as one of those bright drops of arrested rain that were falling from the bushes to the grass, and from the grass to the ground.

How could he pit himself against his daughters when they had his whole organization at their command and he had no command of his own disorganization? Organization, disorganization: all these maddening words that treated him as their ventriloquist’s dummy, not to mention the images of humanely slaughtered tigers that flickered across the deep gray screen of his television mind, because some bastard, some sadistic sky-god who owned all the channels to all the minds of all living creatures everywhere was playing with the programing and the remote control.

Why go on? Why drag his suffering body into the next valley? Why endure the anguish of being alive? Because endurance was what he did, thought Dunbar. He hauled himself up and straightened his body one more time and brought both his fists against his chest, inviting that child-devouring sky-god to do his worst, to rain down information from his satellites, to stream his audiovisual hell of white noise and burning bodies straight into Dunbar’s fragile brain, to try to split its hemispheres, if he could, to try to strangle him with a word-noose, if he dared.

“Come on,” whispered Dunbar hoarsely. “Come on, you bastard.”

The next thing that happened was that he forgot the last thing that happened. He let his hands fall to his side, completely absorbed in watching a raindrop change color as it swelled on the tip of a leaf and flashed into the ground. He longed for its fleeting iridescence; he longed to be absorbed into the earth, or, if the earth wouldn’t have him, to evaporate into the sky, to become part of everything, with no part in anything: no role, no point, no location, no pattern, and no mind.

Nothing could be done to improve this place, except to remove him from it. He imagined being deleted, like obscene graffiti a teacher wipes off the blackboard before writing out the triumphant formula for a perfectly empty valley. Yes, yes, he must go. Although his knees were begging him to sit down and his lower back was begging him to lie down, and his muscles were begging to have him put down, he started to shuffle meekly through the wet grass, doing his best to get a move on, to respect the valley’s very understandable desire to get rid of him. He was a bad man polluting an enchanted space, and the least he could do was to absent himself.

When he had been running a global empire, his cruelty and his vindictiveness and his lies and his tantrums were disguised as the necessary actions of a decisive commander-in-chief, but in his current naked condition the naked character of those actions screamed at him, like ex-prisoners recognizing their torturer in the street, “It’s him! It’s him! He tore out my fingernails, he splintered my kneecaps, he dissolved my marriage, he forced me to resign, he had me sent to prison…” He was too weak to cut their throats and too injured to run away. He was in the unaccustomed position of having to stand there and listen to their point of view. He couldn’t sack them or destroy them, they were not his employees or his opponents: they were his memories, recast in the strange light of destitution and vulnerability. It was no use trying to get an injunction against them, or telling his editors to send in the attack dogs to tear apart their reputations; he couldn’t even nominate them for ridicule when they were already so busy ridiculing him. All the people he had ever hurt—a veritable crowd, it turned out—were turning their wounds into weapons. He tried to quicken his pace, stumbling once or twice in the effort to escape the enemy memory that was chasing him from, well, from the center of his psyche. He might not be able to outrun what was erupting inside him, but perhaps at the top of this next hill there would be a precipice—if there was any justice or mercy in the world there would be a precipice at the top of the next hill—from which to throw himself head first onto some rocks, to dash his brains out, get his brains right out, perform the necessary surgery, get the trouble out of his head, in an unsparing acknowledgment that the only way to save his life was to end it.

All the things he had ever felt ashamed of seemed to have been distilled into the elixir of his own cruelty. An eye for an eye: that was the law. They were holding him down to clamp his head in a vice and slice his eyelids off. No, please, not that. As he climbed higher his vision grew more blurred, feeding his fear of being blinded by the venom of his accumulated crimes. He clutched his head between his powerful hands, to show how tightly trapped it was, but also in the hope of somehow finding the strength to wrench it aside, to avoid letting the corrosive liquid fall, drop by blistering drop, onto his precious, defenseless eyes. No, please, please, please. His heart was bursting with anguish. He scrambled up the last few yards on all fours and collapsed on the brow of the hill.

For a moment his horror was eclipsed by a further insult to his despair. The slope on the far side was no steeper than the one he had just climbed, all very well for a person who wanted to twist an ankle or break a leg, but by no means adequate for the task he had in mind. Without the comfort of a cliff, there was nothing to do but suffer tamely; he didn’t even have the power to organize a swift and particular death. He would have to linger on, cattle-prodded through a labyrinthine slaughterhouse of hunger, exposure, infection, and insanity, or, worse, be rescued, so that he could be paraded at his daughters’ triumph, like a conquered king in chains, pelted with filth and rotten food by the jeering populace.

It was true that in his time he had sacked both Megan and Abigail from key positions in the Dunbar Trust, but only to give them other positions later on and only, always, for their own good, in order to toughen them up and show that unless they could match the suavity and the savagery of his top executives, nepotism would not be allowed to prevail; at any rate, not until the end, when his need for a legacy would make—had made—dynastic considerations paramount. He could now see that if they had misunderstood his motives, the sackings might have set them on the path of revenge. Or perhaps they were angry to be deprived of their mother when they were still so young, perhaps they didn’t understand that he was trying to protect them from a mother who was as mad as a snake. He could feel their pain now; feel that if his daughters were monsters it was because he had made them that way. He had tried to make amends, he had given them everything, everything, but when they got it, all they could think of doing was to treat him as he had treated them. And yet he certainly never treated either of them as harshly as he treated Florence. If there was any reason to stay alive it was to sink to his knees to beg Florence’s forgiveness, but if there was any reason more pressing than the rest to throw himself off the non-existent cliff he had fondly imagined waiting for him at the top of the hill, it was to express the violence of his sorrow at having maltreated the person he loved most in the world, Catherine’s daughter, the only one of his children who had refused to conspire against him, although she had most reason to.

He reached up to protect his eyes, but found that far from being hollowed out by liquid fire, they were wet with ordinary tears. He was surprised, a little indignant, but far too suspicious to be taken in. The fire had been temporarily put out so that his torture could be prolonged, like a hanged man who is cut down so that he can be killed more meticulously. He knew how the world worked: the fireman was an arsonist, the assassin came dressed as a physician, the devil was a bishop harvesting souls for his master, teachers entrusted with children filmed them in the shower and posted their naked bodies on the dark net; he had read the stories, he had read them every morning with his breakfast. Like a puppetmaster who pulls the strings but still has to do the voices for his puppets, Dunbar was partially, if superciliously, merged with his ideal reader: the person who hates chavs and welfare scroungers and perverts and junkies, but also hates toffs and fat cats and tax dodgers and celebrities, in fact the person who hates everybody, except the other people like him, who hate the things that make him feel fear or envy. Dunbar was the man who placed the wafer on their outstretched tongues, transubstantiating the corrosive passivity of fear and envy into the dynamic single-mindedness of hatred. As the high priest of this low practice, he had to admit that in his astonishing new circumstances the view from the altar rail was barely distinguishable from blindness.

If he was not allowed to kill himself straight away, it was because he didn’t deserve to get away so lightly; if his eyes had been temporarily spared, it was so that images of a more intimate horror could imprint themselves on his fading vision and haunt his forthcoming blindness. He searched about for some way to evade his fate. He thought he could make out a talus in the distance, surmounted by a tiny cliff. In his current condition he would need a helicopter to get there, but the last thing he wanted was an amiable and trustworthy pilot encouraging him to admire the view and not to go too near the edge.

He sat up on his knees and clambered painfully to his feet in order to take in a wider view of his surroundings. Neither the valley behind him nor the one ahead contained buildings or structures of any sort: no gates or stiles or walls. Even the Herdwick sheep that had accompanied him on most of his journey so far seemed to find these denuded hills and snowy peaks too remote to venture into. The phrase “in the middle of nowhere” came to Dunbar with the original force that underlies the destructive popularity of cliché. Yes, he was in the middle of nowhere—that was exactly the right phrase. He had always lived and worked in central locations of one sort or another and there was a certain sense of continuity in discovering that he had pulled it off again, even if the place he was in the middle of this time was nowhere, even if the satisfaction of finding an address could not entirely make up for the absence of any shelter, any protection from the icy air trickling through the cracks in his clothing, of any food, or any fire. He was starting to shiver and to feel that marrow numbness that made him dread the onset of night.

“Help!”

Dunbar knew that he was alone and was at a loss to explain the voice he had just heard.

“What?” he called out.

“Help!”

He thought for a moment that it might be the helicopter pilot, the last person to have taken shape in his mind, but he saw no evidence of his existence—if he was a helicopter pilot, where was his helicopter? It just didn’t add up.

His bewilderment turned to alarm as he watched what seemed to be a low mound crack open and take on a human shape. A man in a filthy brown overcoat, his beard loaded with earth, sat up, brushed some of the dirt from his face, and reiterated his request.

“Help,” he said, “help me get these boots off. They’re killing me.”

“Just like my daughters,” said Dunbar, amazed by the coincidence. With a rush of solidarity, he knelt down beside his groaning new acquaintance and started to unlace his mud-caked boots.

“I can hardly feel my feet anymore and when I do, I wish I didn’t. Nothing but blisters.”

“I have blisters on my eyes,” said Dunbar.

“Can you see anything?”

“Hardly a thing,” said Dunbar.

“ ‘If the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch,’ Matthew 15:14.”

“Sounds like a sensible fellow,” said Dunbar. “You’re much better off with a guide dog.”

“I was a vicar—the Reverend Simon Field—but I lost my way: I fell into that ditch of which Matthew speaks.”

“You look more like a tramp than a vicar,” said Dunbar bluntly.

“I am a hermit.”

“That’s what you call a vicar who turns into a tramp,” said Dunbar. “Well, I’m a bum, that’s what you call a billionaire who turns into a tramp.”

“My gambling got the better of me,” said Simon. “I let them strip the lead from the church roof to pay off my debts.”

“Jesus,” said Dunbar, “look at the state of your feet, they’re bleeding.”

“The copper piping went next,” said Simon. “I lost a bet on the outcome of the general election. I thought compassion would prevail, but we live in the age of aspiration, the amphetamine of the masses. After they carried the big old radiators out of the church, I had to announce to the parish that we’d been robbed.”

Dunbar tucked what remained of Simon’s socks into the neck of his boots, lowered his cupped hands into a clear puddle of fresh rainwater and poured the cool liquid over Simon’s traumatized feet.

“My mistake was to confess to the chair of the Church Roof Committee. I thought we were in love, but he sold my story to the press.”

“Gay Vicar Puts Lead in His Pencil,” said Dunbar, drying Simon’s feet with his scarf.

“Oh, I see you’re familiar with the campaign,” said Simon. “ ‘Gay Vicar loses his frock…as bent as the lead he sold to cover his gambling debts…’ and so on and so forth.”

“I know, I know,” said Dunbar, “we shouldn’t have hounded you that way. I’m glad the rumors about your suicide are untrue. My editor wrote to me saying, ‘I see that pouf priest topped himself. Good riddance.’ I told him that was going too far, I told him that was in very poor taste—we didn’t publish that, obviously.”

“I don’t care about all that now,” said Simon. “I know of a cave nearby where we could rest for the night. It’ll give us some protection from the cold. I’ll show you the way, if you like.”

“Thank you,” said Dunbar, helping to put Simon’s boots back on. “That’s very kind of you, especially considering—”

“Never mind all that,” said Simon. “Let’s just make our way to the cave. Now that it’s stopped raining we might be able to get a fire going.”

Dunbar gave Simon a hand and hoisted him to his feet. A gaudy sunset, like a drunken farewell scrawled in lipstick on a mirror, formed the background to their departure, but soon the color drained from the sky, leaving a glassy gray clarity in the air. Simon hobbled forward and with each halting step he looked as if he was about to go down on one knee but just managed to rise again at the last moment. Dunbar, who was in awe of his new companion, started to imitate his walk, and with each partial genuflexion, silhouetted against the ghostly light cast by the snow on the distant peaks, he imagined that he was going down on his knees to beg the forgiveness, one after another, of all the people he had harmed.