Thieves had burst into the shop and one of them threatened the assistant with the knife while the others raided the till and the shelves. They were sweeping bottles and cigarette cartons into a holdall, shouting over the noise of breaking glass.

Mel and another customer were trying to back away as two more people ran into the shop. The thieves panicked and turned to escape but found Mel blocking their route to the door. The blade had gone straight between her ribs. This much Jasper had learned from the police.

I tried to swallow but my throat was dry. ‘It will be on the security cameras. They’ll catch them.’

‘I suppose so,’ Jasper said. It didn’t matter much to either of us at that moment, only Mel mattered, but it was something to say.

Silence seeped between us as we waited.

Outside there were flashes of lightning followed almost instantly by long rolls of thunder. Rain smashed against the room’s windows like handfuls of gravel flung at the glass.

I thought about how arbitrary this act of violence was, and how massive and inescapable it had now become. It wasn’t a dream or an illusion, however much I wanted it to be. The waiting room was real, with its seats and chipped paint and overbreathed air, and so was the hospital that contained it. Somewhere down these corridors, under bright lights, Mel’s life was hanging in the balance. I remembered sitting in the car park of that other hospital, on the day my father died, knowing that the births and dying and the pain happening inside it were part of the natural order, and believing that all of us belonged within the order. Tonight felt like the opposite of that. Mel had been singled out, for no reason, and the order had gone all awry. None of us, no one I knew even, had ever been touched by such a thing before. It belonged in half-heard news bulletins and glimpsed newspaper headlines, not in the ordinary fabric of our ordinary lives.

As I sat with my head hanging, staring at the toes of my shoes against the dull red floor, I thought of the knife thrust as another lightning bolt, discharging the static threat that had built up all this hot summer under the canal bridges and between crawling cars and at the dark end of fetid alleyways. Cassie’s disappearance had presaged it and the relief that followed her discovery now flipped back into fear that was the more intense for having been temporarily allayed.