Hopefully, I feather the wall with wet fingers until they find a switch. The hall fills with light and Victorian tiles appear at my feet arranged symmetrically, intricately, black on white. A huge gilded mirror glares at me from the left with Tiffany wall lamps on either side. The house of an old dame.

A pause. My heart quickens with the waiting. If there’s anybody beyond this hall, these lights will alert them, so for seconds or minutes I am frozen. Waiting. Until … nothing.

Finally, I sink to the floor, my back against the heavy wooden door, and breathe. The pain kicks up again as the adrenaline dissipates. And then I begin to shiver. My heart drops in my chest. It is beginning. If I don’t get dry soon and warm, I am going to get very ill. I rub life into my cold fingers and then when the dexterity returns to them, I unpick the laces of my leather boots and tug them off. Rainwater has pooled inside them so I upturn them against the door to drain them. I stare at my feet, which are covered in plastic bags for warmth. I pull them away and then peel off the damp socks beneath them. The skin of my feet is pale, deathly. I look away from the blisters and the blackness that rims the nails. It always shocks me that my own body sickens me like this. On the cold tiles I stand and take off my coat, shaking it out before wrapping it around my boots and socks. Newspaper I had missed earlier falls now to the floor in sodden balls and the cold begins to climb from there into my bones. I shiver. I watch the other black door at the far end of the corridor, waiting for it to spring open and for anger to appear in its light. I strain my ears for sound but all they pick up is the rain outside. I rub my temples again but the pain refuses to be eased by touch.

If only it will stop for a moment, so I can think.

I gather my coat-boot bundle and walk towards the other door, catching my face in the mirror. It startles me, this face that I know but don’t recognise. My cheeks are burned from weather. The beard is the most striking thing – it’s the thing about me that I forget most often. But the real surprise is in the eyes. And not just that the left has swollen almost shut, but the impression they give: they seem lost, somehow innocent. And then as I am puzzling this, my expression catches me in a flash of anger that I didn’t know I was carrying.

Before I turn the handle on the door, I call out again.