And then, quite suddenly, a woman’s sharp voice from behind me cut into my trail of thought, and that was strange, because there’d been no one there when I last looked.

‘We know of a remote farm in Lincolnshire,’ came the woman’s voice in a slow, persuasive tone, ‘where Mrs Buckley lives. Every July, peas grow there.’

I turned. There was a woman standing next to the Buick, and she was staring at me with a folksy smile, had grey hair tied up in a bun and was wearing a white blouse and a red dress around which was tied a kitchen apron. It was Mrs Nesbit, as she appeared in the endless corporate logos, film and TV commercials – but not the current Mrs Nesbit actress: this was a much younger Zsazsa LeChat, from eight Mrs Nesbits ago. She looked as though she was unaware of her surroundings, and there was a sense of shimmering otherness about her – as though she were not part of the dream, but somehow trespassing within it.

I’d added a younger Zsazsa to the dream, too.

‘Hello,’ I said.

There was a short blast of static and she spoke again. But although the voice appeared to be coming from Mrs Nesbit, the words didn’t match the movements of her mouth. She was the one from where the voice was emerging, but she wasn’t the one speaking. It was Mrs Nesbit, and it wasn’t, just as I was both myself and Don Hector, all at the same time.

‘Deputy Worthing?’ she said, and her voice seemed to sear a hole into my mind like a red-hot needle. I felt myself lift out of the Dreamstate as the pain brought me perilously close to waking, and for a moment I could see the faint outline of Clytemnestra, the open door to the living room and the bedside clock before I fell back into the Dreamstate.

‘Steady, Charlie, we need you asleep. Now: who do you think you are?’

‘I think I’m  . . . Don Hector.’

‘Presumptuous of you, wouldn’t you say? Describe the Buick.’

‘It’s blue, the colour of the sky,’ I said, ‘it’s not new and has various damaged parts, a bit of rust, an AA badge on the grille, off kilter.’

Mrs Nesbit smiled again. She was looking at me, but her eyes were unseeing. What I was witnessing, she could not. She seemed more brightly coloured than the surroundings, and had a thin sparkly aura that ran all around her.

‘Tell me about your childhood.’

‘Pool from birth,’ I said, ‘insurance write-off. I wasn’t adopted on account of my noggin and biting off Gary Findlay’s ear.’

‘Not you – the other you. I want to know about Don Hector.’

‘Nothing,’ I said, ‘I’m only dreaming I’m him.’