He yanked a cord to pull the blind, revealing a grubby little square of window. It was midnight: indistinct shapes went by in the darkness. James thought about all the texts, the messages-in-bottles, shuttling invisibly through the night sky. Some of the recipients would be asleep by now, wouldn’t see the news for hours yet, perhaps not until he’d done it. Others would half-read the message through sleep, or glance at it but fail to absorb it.

But a few people would already have read it, and some perhaps were trying to contact him right now, hammering in vain on the screen-door he had pulled shut across his phone. James wasn’t so detached from his life that he couldn’t see that. If Michaela and Karl saw the message, they would certainly try to get in touch. Their brains would shine a beam on everything good about James, everything (as his message said) they had shared. The mad escapades of years gone by, like the time they raced around all the Monopoly squares in London; or that night they spent grovelling around on hands and knees to capture a frog that had found its way into the flat during a storm. Michaela would remember how he always brought her a morning coffee although – in his own words – he felt like an absolute dingbat trying to say ‘matcha latte’ to the youthful, band-T-shirt-wearing baristas who probably discussed him after he’d gone. Karl would remember watching middle-of-the-night foreign films after a shift, joining the action an hour late, debating who the killer might be only to discover at the end that it hadn’t been a murder mystery in the first place. Both of them would remember the fun things, the filtered memories, and the hysteria of the moment would make them forget that they were the ones who’d helped to cast him into this grim place.

Even people with less invested in James, which was almost everyone else amongst his contacts, would be concerned. Humans were naturally programmed to think that way, for their own protection. They’d say that he ‘wasn’t in his right mind’, that he was a ‘danger to himself’. They would convince themselves that this was a tragedy which needed averting, from which they could emerge as a hero. They would be reacting, in other words, not to James’s actual situation, but to the drama. So their reactions would be fished out of the first-aid kit everyone had for dramas. And they would be wrong. It was a long time since he’d felt so decidedly in his right mind: so calm and in control. As for being a danger to himself – no, it was the opposite. He’d been a danger to himself when he was alive, when he was still trying to make out that he could cope with what that required. He was safe now.