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Greg.
    I reached the man over Vicky, cannoning into him to knock him away. He was heavier than I’d thought and not easily deterred, and far from running from me he seemed to view me as merely another mug to be robbed. He jabbed a strong fist at my face, a blow I ducked from nothing but instinct, and I tried catching him by the clothes and flinging him against a parked car.
    No success. He connected with a fist to my chest that left me breathless and feeling as if he’d squashed my heart against my backbone. The face above the fists was a matter of darkness and narrow eyes: he was shorter than I and thicker.
    I was losing the fight, which made me angry but not much more effective. It was hostility I was up against, I thought, not just greed. Behind the robbery, hatred.
    Vicky, who had crawled away moaning, suddenly rose to her feet as if galvanized and came up behind our assailant. I saw her eyes momentarily over his shoulder, stretched wide with fear and full of determination. She took aim and kicked at him hard. He hissed fiercely with pain and turned towards her and I in turn kicked him, targeting nowhere special but hitting the back of his knee.
    Vicky had her long scarlet nails up, her fingers bent like a witch. There was bright red blood in splashes down her tunic. Her mouth was stretched open in what looked in that dim light like the snarl of a wolf, and out of it came a shriek that began in the low register and rose to a fortissimo scream somewhere above high G.
    It raised the hairs on my own neck and it broke the nerve of the thief. He took a stumbling step to go round her and then another, and belatedly departed at a shambling run.
    Vicky fell weakly into my arms, the fighting fury turning fast to shakes and tears, her triumphant voice roughened and near incoherence.
    “God. Oh God ... There were two of them ... Greg ...”
    Headlights blazed at us, fast advancing. Vicky and I clutched each other like dazzled rabbits and I was bunching muscles to hurl us both out of the way when tires squealed to a stop and the black figure emerging like a silhouette through the bright beam resolved itself into the solid familiarity of Fred. The consul to the rescue. Good old Fred. I felt a bit light-headed, and stupid because of it.
    “Is she all right?” Fred was asking me anxiously. “Where’s Greg?”
    Vicky and I declutched and the three of us in unison looked for Greg.
    He wasn’t hard to find. He was lying in a tumbled unconscious heap near the rear wheel on the far side of what turned out to be his and Vicky’s dark blue BMW.
    There was a stunned moment of disbelief and horror. Then, crying out, Vicky fell on her knees beside him and I squatted down and felt round his neck, searching for the pulse under his jaw.
    “He’s alive,” I said, relieved, straightening.
    Vicky sniffed in her tears, still crying with distress. Fred, ever practical, said, “We’d better get an ambulance.”
    I agreed with him, but before we could do anything a police car wailed with its siren down the road and drew up beside us, red, white and blue lights flashing in a bar across the car’s roof.
    A big man in midnight blue trousers and shirt with insignia stepped out, bringing his notebook to the ready and telling us someone had just reported a woman screaming and what was it all about. Fast, I thought. Response time, spectacular. He had been cruising nearby, he said.
    Greg began moaning before anyone could answer and struggled to sit up, appearing dazed and disoriented and startlingly old.
    Vicky supported him round the shoulders. Looking at her with pathos and pain and gratitude, he saw the blood on her tunic and said he was sorry.
    “Sorry!” Vicky exclaimed blankly. “What for?”
    He didn’t answer, but one could see what he meant: sorry that he hadn’t been able to defend her. It was encouraging, I thought, that he seemed to know where he was and what had happened.
    The policeman unclipped a hand-held radio from his belt and