It was possibly because of that old fondness for train trips that James had taken the job at the station after Karl’s betrayal. He’d prepared various things to say in the interview about his history with trains, his enthusiasm for them, but the man across the desk – Waqar, his future supervisor – wasn’t interested in that. He asked about James’s ‘core skills’ and where he saw himself in five years. Neither of them could have imagined what the answer was: that even a year from that moment, there wouldn’t be a James to talk about.

On the ‘core skills’ question, James did quite well. ‘I get a lot of satisfaction from helping people,’ he said. ‘In my last few jobs I’ve always tried to get people out of tight spots, or … or give them advice, whatever I could do.’ He thought briefly of the woman he’d taken to hospital and wondered what had happened to her in the end; of the people he’d neglected to charge.

‘So you was a taxi driver, yeah?’ said Waqar.

‘Private hire. So you had to book in advance, you couldn’t just—’

‘And then before that you was working for – you was a software engineer, you was working as brand manager for a health and fitness company.’

The phrase sounded even sillier, in the dejected plastic and steel backdrop of the staff canteen, than it had when James had printed the CV out in his kitchen. He hadn’t really expected the interview to be in the canteen. There was a man opposite who’d left half of a delicious-looking doughnut on his tray, the jam oozing from it. James’s stomach kept growling, affronted.

‘Brand manager is a bit of newspeak, really,’ said James, ‘but—’

‘You what, sorry?’

‘I mean.’ It was too hot in the canteen, hot and stifling. The doughnut was almost close enough to touch. ‘Well, my job was really to run the business, while my – my business partner, er, she was the face of it, my actual partner in fact, but …’

He swallowed. Waqar repositioned his head to suggest something approaching discretion.

‘It says in your reference you’re …’ Waqar licked his lips in simulated thoughtfulness, and scanned the words Karl had fobbed James off with. ‘A valued friend to a lot of people.’

‘I have certain skills,’ said James, but Waqar looked blankly at him and James winced, both at the present moment and at the memory it nudged in his mind.

He’d got the job. It was a relief: in the insomniac fortnight since Karl had fired him, the emptiness of days, the sense of lost purpose, had scratched at James all night, flipping him over and over, eventually out of his bed to trudge around the dark rooms in search of nothing. What he hadn’t realized was that when he started work, those feelings would be even stronger.