My mind, however, was no longer worrying about death or fatal injury from golf-cart accidents, but Project Lazarus. Statistics about nightwalkers were always patchy but from what Lucy and The Notable Goodnight were saying, nightwalkers could be entering a new phase of usefulness. More annoyingly, my decision to take on an insanely dangerous overwintering gig simply to guarantee Morphenox rights might be rendered pointless if they were giving it away to all and sundry.

My thought trail petered out as we had quite suddenly slowed to a halt. I looked across at the driver. He was leaning forward and motionless, staring at the floor ahead. I put out a hand to touch him but as I did so he suddenly turned and fixed me with a confused stare.

‘Will you tell her I’m sorry?’ he said in a clear, lucid tone.

I was taken aback – it was as though he had suddenly forgotten he was a nightwalker.

‘Tell who?’

‘It was a huge mistake,’ he added with a look of bewilderment, as though he didn’t know what he was saying or quite why he was saying it, ‘and not a week goes by without me thinking about her.’

A frown crossed his brow as though he were attempting to pick up a lost thread. He looked confused, then lost, and his lower lip began to tremble. And then tears – of frustration, I think – welled up in his eyes and rolled down his cheeks.

I laid a hand on his shoulder.

‘Dave?’ I said. ‘Are you okay?’

But he said nothing and we were off again with a squeal of tyres. A minute or two later and we were back at reception.

‘Thank-you-for-travelling-with-HiberTech,’ said Dave mechanically, ‘have-a-pleasant-onward-journey.’

I walked over to the reception desk to return my visitor’s badge.

‘Charlie!’ said Josh. ‘Check out what I’ve made for you to lift your spirits, so to speak. I call it the “Full Spectrum Swizzle” and it features blackberry, mint, cola and lemon syrups. I’ve juiced seven lemons and an entire watermelon to make it using a new, efficient and incredibly unsafe technique that I’m calling hand-in-a-blender. If you find a hard chewy bit, it might be the tip of my little finger.’

‘Really?’

‘Yes. In the forefront of culinary innovation,’ he added cheerfully, ‘there are always casualties.’

He held up a bandaged finger as if to demonstrate the fact, and I stared at the drink.

‘You could have sieved it to get the finger out,’ I said.

‘Then you’d lose all the fruity bits. It’s only the tip, mind, hardly anything at all.’

I tasted the drink, which was a cross between a smoothie and a mint latte. It was actually very good, and I told him so.

‘Glad,’ he said, ‘very glad.’

I drank the rest, picked out the tip of the finger before I swallowed it and found that it was indeed quite small, and laid the empty glass on the counter.