She didn’t respond, and I poked her cheek with my flashlight to make sure I wasn’t hallucinating. It was her: thinner than when I’d seen her last, and considerably less full of life. I put out my hand to touch her but she snapped at my fingers and grasped my forearm so tightly I could feel her fingernails puncture the skin.

‘Charlie,’ she said again, ‘I  . . . love you.’

‘No,’ I said, as the full relevance of her words struck home, ‘no, no, not possible.’

It had happened again: first her name, then the car, then the rabbit’s-foot key ring, then her saying she loved Charlie as she had in the dream. It wasn’t meant to work that way. It couldn’t work that way.

Reality, then dream. Cause, then effect.

She snapped her teeth at me again. I had some Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut on me, which she ate without preamble, along with my last shortbread finger and half a Wagon Wheel I was keeping for emergencies.

‘Is this why you’re under the Buick?’ I asked. ‘Drawn to it by the dream?’

The questioning was pointless, as Birgitta was now well beyond the capacity for intelligent conversation. But oddly, beneath the grime and matted hair, dirt and cobwebs, her eyes were precisely as I remembered them – violet, and of extraordinary clarity and brightness.

As I was pondering her looks, the paradox of her acting out my dream, the almost unthinkable reality that it was I who had supplied her with the Morphenox and that she would now have to be retired, I heard a shuffling noise close by. I flicked the flashlight around and could see two chunky male legs from mid-shin down, presumably Eddie Tangiers, the newcomer Lloyd had warned me about. I made to roll out the opposite side but noticed there was a nightwalker this side, too – a female, wearing bunny slippers.

As I watched, a bony set of fingers clasped the bottom edge of the car’s rear mudguard and an expressionless face peered in at me upside down. She was somewhere in her twenties, had a pale complexion, was missing an eye and wore a tiara stuck in her rumpled blond hair. I was concerned to be surrounded and outnumbered by three people who regarded me only as today’s one major food group, but there were two things in my favour: first that they were slow, and second, that they were very, very stupid.