It was moving at twice the speed of the traffic on the motorway, barrelling down the hard shoulder at a good sixty miles an hour, and it went through Mr Click-Click as if he wasn’t there. The force threw him into the air and into the middle lane of the motorway. The traffic skidded, slowed and finally stopped in a cacophony of angry horns.

And the men on both sides of the road went wild.

A cry of disbelieving joy went up at the sight of this miracle – the lorries on the last road out of France, stopping as if to pick up passengers. As they ran into the stationary traffic I stumbled after them, still trying to understand what I had seen.

Mr Click-Click on the far side of the road.

The lorry speeding on the hard shoulder.

Then the sickening impact of tons of steel colliding with flesh, blood and bone, and tossing him into the air as if it all weighed nothing.

But I could not see any sign of the lorry that had hit him – it had not slowed down, let alone stopped with the rest of the traffic, it had just kept on speeding down the empty hard shoulder – and I could see no sign of Mr Click-Click or whatever was left of him. I walked among the motionless lorries, still spilling their diesel fumes, the drivers with their windows down and voices from a dozen nations, but mostly the accents of London and Liverpool and Glasgow, and I wondered if I had imagined it.

And then I saw the blood.

A long streak of it across the tarmac, so much of it that at first I believed it had to be something else, it could not all be from one man, but then I could smell it, that metallic tang of freshly spilled blood. I followed the trail to the back of a massive blue Scania lorry with the picture of some market town idyll on the side. VISIT LINCOLN CATHEDRAL, it advised, spires against a blue sky, and my eyes drifted from that scene of tranquil beauty to the mangled body of the man who had been thrown beneath it by the lorry still speeding away on the hard shoulder.

I watched it disappearing into the distance without even a blink of brake lights. And I stared up at the appalled face of the driver of the VISIT LINCOLN CATHEDRAL lorry, almost grey with shock.

And I saw that Mr Click-Click was roadkill now.

Everywhere men were climbing into the backs of lorries. Drivers were getting out of their cabs, but they were always one against many, and the men in the back of the lorries jeered and laughed openly at the useless baseball bats the drivers carried. Nobody was paying any attention to Mr Click-Click. It was as if I was the only one who knew he was there.