I vor was appalled. He searched through the diary for any indication of who the tutor had been. There were one or two clues but no actual name. He was a Russian, somebody Yaraslav had tutored himself for a while before he left that country, and who had later become a Grand Master but never a serious contender for the championship. And of course he had to be somebody living in England. Ivor followed it up in the only way he could think of. He telephoned FIDE, the World Chess Federation, and said that he was anxious to contact his boyhood chess tutor but now that his mother had passed away he had only a dim recollection of who the man was. At first the official he spoke to was suspicious, but on hearing that Ivor was the son of Yaraslav Chenkov his whole demeanour changed and he provided three likely suggestions, complete with contact details. One of the addresses jumped out at Ivor. It was the cottage in rural Essex, a few hundred yards from where he had had his accident.

“Bingo!” he said to Anna as he put down the phone, “I’ve cracked it! I know everything now. Who was supplying the poison, why he was doing it, who was paying him to do it – everything. The bits I don’t know I can fill in pretty easily. Ivor never made it as chess champion so he turned his talents to making money. He was damned good at it, if not entirely honest. He kept on taking it because he believed that he needed it, that all his abilities came from it. When his Dad stopped funding his habit he started funding it himself, out of the money he was skimming off the top at work. He had it all worked out. I say ‘him’ but we both know I mean me – but a different me. I don’t care what Dr Sullivan says, we’re two different people. Then, the accident. Ivor 1 turns into Ivor 2. He has no use for what the drug-pusher is selling. The drug-pusher gets upset. Pretty simple really, isn’t it?”

She nodded, but her heart seemed to be heavy. “Yes, Ivor, pretty simple. What are you going to do now?”

“We’ve got to go out to him, speak to him, pay off whatever Ivor owes and tell him we don’t want any more. The gravy train stops here. If he won’t play ball we’ll threaten him with exposure. I don’t think he’ll want that.”

She nodded. “We don’t have to go right away, do we?”

"We didn’t keep last night’s appointment. I think he’ll phone again tonight. Will you drive me? You can wait in the car,

I’ll do the talking.”

Anna seemed very hesitant. “It might be dangerous, Ive. Maybe we should… I don’t know.”

“Trust me, Anna. He wants my money. He isn’t going to shoot me. I’m the goose that lays the golden eggs. And he thinks I’m addicted to

that stuff.”

“I… suppose you’re right.”

Anna remained unusually silent for the rest of the evening. Shortly before midnight, the phone rang as expected. “Ivor,” said the foreign voice reproachfully, “you let me down. You didn’t keep our appointment.”

“There were problems, Vladimir. But we do need to talk.”

“So, you’ve remembered my name. That’s good. When can I expect you?”

“It’s a forty-five minute drive. Expect me within the hour.”

“I shall look forward to it.”

The phone went dead. Anna watched him closely but still didn’t speak. “You’re upset about this, aren’t you? You don’t think I should go.”

She didn’t reply right away.

“Ive, there’s so much about… your other self… that you don’t know. He was such a devious man. He lived such a complicated life…”

“That’s why I’m going, Anna. To end some of the complication. If we don’t make a clean break he’s never going to leave

us alone.”

She turned towards the kitchen, her expression heavier than ever. “I’ll make us a drink before we go,” she said.

“What is this? The parting glass? Aren’t you being a bit melodramatic? This is a good development, Anna. Be happy. Relax.”

She returned with a glass of Ivor’s favourite single malt and a fruit juice for herself. “What will we drink to?” Ivor asked, taking the glass.

She hesitated. “To… loyalty,” she said hesitantly. Ivor laughed and took a generous mouthful. “And long life!”

he added jovially.

***************

Ivor felt increasingly drowsy on the journey to Vladimir’s house. The gentle motion of the car made him think of New Hampshire and the tree house moving in the wind. He could see painting things and a few picture books on the crude wooden floor, smell the smoke from Yaraslav‘s barbecue somewhere in the garden below, hear the raised voices of house guests and the laughter of the neighbourhood children. Why didn’t they play with him, he wondered?

He had a tree house, and a proper two-wheel bicycle, and a train set…

The car came to a halt and Ivor looked up to see that they were in a small paved courtyard right outside the cottage with the three windows that he had seen from that fateful stretch of road. The front door was open and the slightly hunched figure of an old man was silhouetted in the doorway. Ivor felt unthreatened.

“Wait here. I won’t be very long,” he said to Anna and stepped from the car.

The old man held out his hand in greeting like a long lost friend. “Ivor. Good to see you again. Your accident has left no scars.”

He refused to take the hand that was offered. “There may be no scars but things have changed. We need to talk. Can I come inside?”

“Please do.” He followed the old man into a brightly lit and well appointed sitting room. “Please take a seat. I believe you have a liking for the expensive drink. I bought some specially for you.”

“Thank you, I don’t want a drink.”

Vladimir motioned him into an easy chair and sat down in the facing one. He was quite an elegant man, well groomed and with a confident, cultivated air. “I was a good friend of your father, you know.” he offered.

“Closing your account. Goodness me. Such finality I hear in those words.

Are you sure you wouldn’t like that drink?”

“Quite sure. I had one before I came out and it’s made my head a bit groggy.”

“Then I’ll just pour one for myself.” Vladimir got up and poured a generous drink and as he returned he smiled at Ivor like a kind old uncle and raised his finger. “You should stick to that. Much more pure.”

“Thank you for your advice. Now, have you heard what I said to you?”

Vladimir nodded, a little too enthusiastically. “Oh yes, yes, I heard everything.”

He paused. “Now, perhaps you would like to listen while I talk. When you read your father’s diary, did you come across anything about your boyhood friend Sam?”

“How did you know I’d read the diary?”

“Well, you’ve had it since you were about fifteen years old, why would you not have read it?”

“Yes, of course, I’m not thinking straight. Sam. Yes, he said something about me not mentioning Sam any more. Something a bit cryptic. Who was Sam?”

“I think you know.”

Ivor’s eyes narrowed. “I’ve had dreams about Sam. I can’t get his name out of my head. He seemed to be there – and yet not there – all the time when I was a boy. His name is so familiar, and yet I can never see his face…”

He took a generous sip before he replied. “Sam was Ivor’s friend. His imaginary friend.”

The colour drained from Ivor’s face. “What are you trying to tell me?”

“You don’t exist… May I call you Sam? You never did, except in Ivor’s imagination. He was an only child and had a very solitary childhood. It was almost inevitable that he would invent an imaginary friend. He talked about you a lot when he first came to England. He would have been about seven or eight years old. Do you want to know why you were called Sam? Ivor saw some TV programme where they talked about Uncle Sam. They meant America of course, but Ivor didn’t know that. Uncle Sam seemed to be a kindly caring person that everyone loved. So he created his own Uncle Sam. It was an interesting creation because most children invent imaginary friends very much like themselves, but Ivor had so little contact with boys of his own age that when he came to invent an imaginary friend he invented an adult. You. Good old Uncle Sam. Not a fully realised adult, as you may have discovered. A little bit… what shall I say? Intellectually challenged.”

Ivor’s head was throbbing with information that he could not take in, feelings that threatened to overpower him and shut down his mind. He was fighting not just for understanding but for consciousness itself. Darkness was pulling him down, trying to engulf him. “That isn’t possible… Imaginary friends are… imaginary…”

“Quite so, but you have to remember how cotalin works. It creates partitions in the mind. Discrete processes can take place behind individual partitions without affecting one another. It splits one mind into two or many minds. And what is a human being but the collective name for a group of mental processes? The truth is, Ivor is no more real than Sam, just as I am no more real than Anna, or the president of Russia. We are all just the firings of tiny brain cells, and the pattern of their interconnection. Nobody is more than that, or less than that. But in your case, the miracle of human identity has been set in motion twice within the same human skull. Your head contains two people, Ivor and Sam. It doesn’t really matter which came first, both of them are there now. But there is only one set of motor neurones, only one body.

Only one of you can have control at any given time. And the switch, the thing that turns one of you off and the other one on, is this.” He held up a phial of clear liquid, identical to the ones Ivor had seen in the cardboard box. From a desk drawer he produced a disposable syringe and carefully pushed the needle through the rubber top of the phial. “So you see Sam or Ivor we can’t close your account just yet. As you are fond of saying yourself, you are the goose that lays the golden eggs.” He pulled out the syringe, held it upside down, and carefully eliminated the air. “As a matter of interest, you didn’t suffer any brain damage from that minor concussion in the car. Your mental state caused the accident; it was not the result of the accident. We had a problem with our supplier; we let things drift for too long. The new supply has only just reached me, in fact. You were trying to function on too low a dose, and because of that, the switch flipped. And at a very inconvenient moment.”

Ivor tried to get up from the seat and found that his legs wouldn’t respond. At last it got through to his sluggish consciousness that the drink Anna had given him was spiked. Consciousness was diminishing like the sand running through an hour glass. The world was fading out.

Suddenly Anna was right in front of him, trying to get to him, watching him with those big dark pleading eyes, while Vladimir held her back. Tears were trickling down her face. “I told you I had betrayed you,” she said quietly, “and you said you forgave me, but you didn’t understand. I never wanted to do this, Ivor. I never wanted to lose you again… I want to tell you everything, before you go. Vladimir is my father, you see. You married your chess tutor’s daughter. And you really are the golden goose. We can’t let Ivor die. He has to live again and get his old job back. People in the West only hear about the rich Russians, they don’t realise how many poor ones there are, how hard it’s been for ordinary people since the Soviet Union fell. Ivor wasn’t just supporting the two of us, he was keeping a whole village alive. So many dependants… good people... innocent people… We can’t let him abandon us. I’m truly sorry. You’re a good man, and I think I even love you a little bit, but that’s the way it has to be.”

Vladimir released Anna who sat on the bed and wept. He walked up to Ivor’s helpless figure with the syringe in his hand. “We won’t be meeting again, Sam. Please, don’t think too badly of us…”