‘Well, then what?’ James disliked the imploring lift in his voice, the creeping alarm that it reflected. But this wasn’t some malevolent boss like in movies, tie askew, whisky glass in front of him, hiring and firing. This was Karl. His friend. So what was happening, what James realized was happening, could not be happening. He couldn’t have guessed the details, at this point. There would have been no way for him to imagine that Karl, panicking, had offered the enraged manager the one sweetener he could think of, bought himself some time with James’s head. I’ll fire the driver. Make sure he never deals with any of your clients again. If James had been able to hear Karl say those words about him, he wouldn’t have believed it.

But if the details were not in his grasp, James could at least read the general direction this was going in, and he felt sweat break out at the base of his spine.

‘You can’t be – you can’t be saying that …’

‘I don’t have a choice, James.’

The voice had been more dulled than ever, and the use of James’s actual name this time – no tint of irony, as formal as if they were meeting for the first time – was like the sound of a door closing.

*

He’d broken the back of this. There was a certain confidence in the way the train was steaming along now. James knew that the last stretch of this journey always felt downhill, like you were riding a toboggan. They couldn’t be far from Carlisle. There, with a series of winching, wrestling thumps, engineers would part the two halves of the train. The sky would be streaky by that point, light leaking into it. Half of James’s unwitting companions would head for Glasgow, many of them jolted from sleep for this final leg. And James’s half would cruise on to Edinburgh, would glide into Waverley station where he used to walk up the steps with Dad, tasting the always colder air, relishing the sense of weight lifted, of being back among all the happy old ghosts of themselves. A feeling you could only get in a place that was like home, but not home. Today, he wasn’t going to get that sensation. Today there would just be the memory of it, like a tune he couldn’t quite remember any more. But it felt right to be there. It felt right to be as close to Dad as possible, for this.