Afterwards, he couldn’t remember all this with any coherence. There’d been a room he’d been taken to, a small side room; and then an ambulance. He’d been OK about going to the room, but when he saw the uniformed paramedics he tried to fight them off. Because they were going to bring him back to the hospital where he’d been taken after the car accident: it was all going to happen again, just like before. Waiting for hours in a curtained cubicle, not able to reach Cass or Georgie; the loneliness, the shame. Then Nick would come to collect him and take him to the station, and send him away. It was going to keep happening. He knew that as soon as he saw the ambulance crew.

It didn’t look the same as the Cornwall hospital. But that could be a trick, to lull him. He shouted as loud as he could for someone to help him. If he called their names, Cass and Georgie would hear him and come to get him out, wouldn’t they? But they didn’t appear. His mouth was dry and there was a ringing feeling in his ears; the kind of underwater, deaf sensation you got after you’d been to a gig. Maybe he’d damaged his hearing with the volume of his own cries. He was trying to escape, trying to get up out of the chair they were wheeling him in, but then a doctor came and gave him an injection and there was a feeling as of a great pressure being released, like a valve being undone, and everything went black.

When he woke up he was in a bed with a tube in his arm. There wasn’t anyone else in the room.

He tried to piece together the sequence of events that had brought him here, but his head was sore, as if he’d stood up suddenly and hit it on a beam. Maybe it’d be better to just lie still. He lay back and closed his eyes. For the first time since before Hamish’s party he didn’t feel anxious or full of fear. He just felt tired now.

He didn’t know how long he’d been there when someone brought a trolley round. He wasn’t sure if it was lunch or supper. Stephen was given a sandwich and an orange drink.

‘We’re going to spoil you. You can choose: ice-cream or jelly?’

Stephen couldn’t decide. He loved ice-cream and he loved jelly as well.

‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘Is it red jelly?’

‘More like yellow. Pineapple, I’d say.’

‘Can I have the ice-cream, then?’