The morning was rainy again, the streets shining like wet sealskin, a streetlamp or two still bewilderedly alight in the dark day. The cars sloshed and splashed up and down as usual. The shops were blank. People began to emerge like agitated rabbits, going early to work, and lighted buses streamed into the streets.

She knew the way. She crossed the dappled river with confidence and climbed into the skirl of streets above. She mistook a turning, but only once, then came to Wagon Street. It was ten past eight. Surely the only connection of the week to Fleasham would not leave so prematurely? She had not judged the time properly. She hastened into the station building.

Thank God there were people on the platform, on both platforms indeed, standing as if for execution in bowed resignation among the dripping umbrellas, soggy papers.

In the ticket office was a man.

‘What time is the Fleasham train?’

He looked at her, frowned. ‘Which?’

‘Fleasham. It only runs today. The connection to Poorly. I want to get to London.’

‘Oh that’s Bleasham you want.’ The man produced a Bible and consulted it.

It might run at six o’clock tonight for all she knew. Never mind. She could wait.

‘That’s at ten forty-five am.’

Rachaela smiled. ‘Then I haven’t missed it.’

The man laughed confidingly. ‘Well, in a manner of speaking you have. It goes on a Tuesday morning, not a Friday. It’s the Fletchers Junction that runs today.’

‘Is there any other way,’ she said, ‘I can get to Poorly?’

‘Not by train. And there’s no London connection at Poorly until Tuesday. Tuesday or Thursday. Eleven-fifteen.’

The day she had asked the policeman. That had been Tuesday. And he had told her Friday.

Her circumstances struck her like a weight of bricks.

She had nowhere to go and four more days to wait.

Well, she would have to wait them. What else could she do.

She did not thank the beaming man, radiant with his bad news. He would say to his mates, ‘Some bloody woman here wanted the Bleasham for Poorly, and she’s expecting it to run to suit her on the Friday. I told her. Nothing till next week.’

She would find another bed-and-breakfast hotel; not, not the same one. A waste of valuable cash, but there. And she would waste away the days, the horrible noisy Friday, Saturday, the deadly church-bell Sunday, and on Monday it would only be one more day. If what this one had told her were actually true.

Outside the station a hot pulse of fear came over her. It was not fear of the house of the Scarabae, or of their pursuit. It was a fear of the town. Its streets and people, the cars, another institutional room overlooking drains and glaucoma window-nets.

Don’t be a fool It’s all right.