Very likely this, this little adventure, was as close as the two of them would ever be in their lives. Maybe in five years he would be working back in wherever it was, the Basque area, as a head chef in some seafood place. And she would be a project manager for an NGO that tracked down political exiles or something. They would still be contacts on each other’s phones, still like each other’s posts. They would think from time to time about this night, and about how their continued existences helped in some stealthy and intangible way to make each other the people they now were.

She wouldn’t be able to get that across to him, either: not in English or in any other language.

It was a future you could imagine. ‘Being friends, that’s how to do it.’ It was a revelation of some kind. It was a good future to imagine; better than anything she’d consciously pictured before. She looked at the screen and she wondered if James would be in her future, in anyone’s.

31

A1 NEAR DUNBAR, 07:15

Karl had known that he had to make the call before he even left the precinct of the hotel: because it would be dangerous using the hands-free while driving at the nine hundred miles an hour he was planning to, but also because if he put it off, he wouldn’t do it. Christ knew he was obviously enough of a coward that he’d let it get to this stage. That he’d thrown his friend under the bus to keep himself from going under it.

No, this wasn’t helping. ‘All right, come on Karl, come on mate.’ He tried, once more, to talk to himself the way he used to imagine his dad would talk to him, when he came back for good, when things were better. ‘We’re going to call Elton. Call him right now. Tell him what happened. Get him to help.’

It was the only card Karl had left, and it wasn’t much of a card, and he might be throwing it onto the table after everyone else had left the game. ‘No. Come on. He’s still out there. He could be on that train. Come on, mate.’

It took three attempts, even with Hamish Elton’s name in front of him on the screen, to press the button and launch the call. He wound down the window; cool air crept around the back of his neck. He stared at Elton’s name. Every minute he sat here and didn’t do anything was a minute he wasn’t driving to Edinburgh.