During the past twenty years, the life of a banker had taken Dan to many far corners of the world. He liked to think of himself as a seasoned traveler, flying in the relative comfort of business class to America and Europe, to Russia and Australia, to the Middle East and the Far East. Over the years, he had worked out how to combat jetlag so that he was able to get off a plane and go straight into a meeting without feeling that his brain was swimming in syrup. But never, in all the time that he had been circumnavigating the globe, had he experienced quite such an uncomfortable journey as the one that he was undertaking now, as the overnight sleeper from Euston rocked and juddered its way northwards towards Scotland.

By three o’clock in the morning, he had all but given up trying to get any sleep. The coarse linen sheet and meagre woollen blanket that were his allotted coverings for the night seemed to be drawn magnetically towards the floor, and he had had to get up at least five times (twice thumping his head on the extremely hard wooden edging of the upper bunk) to try to work out yet another way of getting the bloody things to stay on his bed. If the stifling heat in the compartment had been consistent, then he wouldn’t have bothered, but every now and again the heating system would go into reverse thrust and the temperature would drop sharply to a level that would render a sealskin-clad Eskimo incapacitated with frostbite.

His traveling companion, a rotund tractor salesman from some market town just outside Glasgow, was having no such problems in sleeping. He had engaged Dan in lively conversation from the moment that he had entered their shoebox-sized compartment and Dan had understood absolutely nothing of the guttural soliloquy that had been imparted to him. It had been even more disconcerting when the man had started to undress himself in an area that only allowed for one foot to come into contact with the floor at any one time. Dan had wedged himself into the corner of his bunk, watching in trepidation as the man’s huge, boxer-shorted backside came ever closer to him. It reminded him too much of a film in which an unfortunate Mafia victim came to a grisly end inside a giant hydraulic scrap metal press. The man had then heaved himself up the ladder to his bunk (Dan had averted his eyes at that point as the boxer shorts left nothing to the imagination), turned off his light, thumped his pillow twice, broke wind loudly, and immediately fell into a deep and sonorous sleep.