The room was dark.

Above and behind me, the medical monitor hummed and clicked. A crack of green fluorescent light escaped from the bathroom and picked out a jug of water and a plastic beaker on a trolley by the bed. Apart from that the room was bare. It looked like I’d been moved to a new ward. I closed and opened my eyes. The beaker disappeared and reappeared. It was definitely there. I was definitely awake. And I was alone – inside the room, at least. Outside, a policeman would be sitting in the corridor trying not to doze off, no doubt cursing his luck to his mates at being put on a babysitting detail while secretly being relieved at the warmth it offered.

I untangled the observations in my dreams from the observations of my doctors and began to weave myself back into reality. Thread by thread I knitted myself into Frank’s knot garden. The container. The doctor. The killing. I couldn’t recall hitting the water, but memories of the swim washed over me: head down; front crawl; lifting my face just enough to suck in the black air before the next wave broke across my back. The beacon I’d been aiming for had been ripped out of view within seconds, torn away from me by the running tide.

I was in hospital in Kent. The ship could have sailed south through the Irish Sea and through St George’s Channel, or cut out into the Atlantic before moving east along the English Channel. In my condition, in that water, there was no way I could have swum more than a thousand metres – which meant that when I’d dived we’d been coming into Dover or looking for anchorage in the Downs. There was no other way we would, could, have been that close to shore, heading in that direction, in a ship that size. If I’d embarked at Dublin Port – or anywhere on the east coast of Ireland – it would mean I’d been at sea for two or three days, and then possibly in hospital for a day more. And that meant that whoever was on that ship was likely only a day behind me.