I see her walking, but we overtake, and I turn round to stare out of the back windscreen. She isn’t looking at me. We are pulling out to turn right when I see her standing on the pavement. We’ve gone before the next thing, whatever it is, can happen. I am so frustrated I could scream.

They drive me to Devon. It’s boring. We get there at three, and Dad is waiting. They take me to the emergency doctor for a psychiatric referral. We have a little bit of time to wait at Beachview. Dad gives me the money for a can of Coke. I turn and crash into a man who swears at me, and then I walk into the little room exactly, exactly, exactly as I always do.

23

Joe was different. He was glowing, buzzing.

‘Oh my God, Ariel.’ He was practically dancing. ‘I went to London! And on the way I met another ghost! I met her on the train. She dies on the same day as me!’

I pushed down my stab of jealousy because it was so stupid and selfish.

‘Tell me everything.’ I forced a smile, imagining Joe and this girl ghost reliving their joint last day eternally, and being happy and in love together forever.

When he said she was fifty-two, I was ashamed at how relieved I felt. I looked her up at once. There were a few memorials to her on the internet. Lara Billingham had been travelling to work in London and was knocked down by a car that didn’t stop, just outside Paddington station. The driver had never been found. There was a suggestion that she’d been pushed.

I shivered all over when I saw the date: it had happened on 11 March 1999, just as Joe said. No one knew who had done this to her or why, and that, I supposed, was how she had come to be destined to commute to work every single day.

‘She was knitting a jumper for her grandchild on the train,’ he said. ‘The baby was due a couple of months later. The knitting was pink, so I guess it was going to be a girl? I didn’t think to ask. Her son’s called Josh Billingham.’

It didn’t take me long to find the answer to that too. Mabel Billingham had been born on 7 June 1999, and so was nearly twenty. I showed Joe her photo. She had long straightened hair and wore lipgloss, and she was a student in Leeds, studying engineering.

‘Oh fucking hell,’ he said. ‘I wish I could show this to Lara. I’ll go back and tell her.’

‘Do,’ I said. ‘I’m glad you met someone else.’ I thought that Lara could be a kind of replacement mother for him, but I didn’t say that. ‘Are you going to go and see the guy in Bodmin?’ I asked instead.