Johansson wished such an island existed because on current form he’d have won it ten times over.

729

Michael Davies told his wife he’d had a near miss.

“Don’t tell me that,” said Beth. “Why do you tell me these things? I’m flying tomorrow and here you are telling me . . . I need to hear that everything is running like clockwork, I need to hear that the margins of error are . . . I don’t need . . . I need . . .”

Michael said he nearly hit a woman in the middle of the road.

“Oh.”

He said he stopped and shouted at her.

“Did she say anything?”

“I thought she was going to.”

“What did she look like?”

“Brown hair, cut short. Big coat, cream color, which was open, and she had a sweatshirt underneath. Light blue, I think, although the lights were making everything look yellow. It had writing on it. And a hood.”

“How tall was she?”

“Not very tall, normal, your height. She had jeans on, I think. And she had a big suitcase. A solid one. It had wheels on one corner and she was pulling it along.”

“What about her face?”

“Didn’t really see it.”

“Did she look like me?”

“Why would she look like you?”

“Well, did she?”

“What do you mean? Scarred?”

“Scarred, or scared.”

“No. A bit scared, perhaps. She was pale.”

“Sick?”

“No more . . . I don’t know, I can’t think of the word.”

“Ill? Nauseous? Panicky?”

“She didn’t look like you.”

“Ashen?”

“All right. Ashen. She looked ashen.”

“Anything else?”

“I don’t remember anything else. Stop asking.”

Beth thought if the woman looked like her, Michael probably tried to run over her deliberately.

“I got distracted by that tape, You Too Can Fly,” said Michael.

728

Dr. Frankburg was struggling with the alarm to his office building. Pigheaded piece of shit. After trying three different four-digit numbers, all of which he was sure had worked in the past, the machine flashed up the curt message that the user had one more opportunity to get the code correct, otherwise the system would disable itself.

“Fuck it.” He took the threat seriously and left the building. The place was locked up and secure. No one took any notice of alarms anyway.

727

From across the road Cody Jameson watched Frankburg give up and walk away. She watched him limp a little and wondered what he’d done to himself.

726

Frankburg’s car was parked on a street half a mile away. His earlier sprint to the office had strained some mysterious ligament and he cursed the complicated design of the knee.

He hobbled past the Wellington Arms and noticed in its emerging clientele symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder. He passed an advertisement for an airline, and then he passed a telephone box and the two things together made him enter it and call up Graham Johansson. It was a legitimate call. Not curiosity, just rescheduling.