‘We could take her something she likes. And she’d probably be glad to know that Guilty is OK.’

‘They smell bad, too,’ said Kasandra, not listening to him. ‘That horrible disinfectant smell.’

‘When you’re up close to Mrs Tachyon you won’t notice.’

‘You’re just going on about it because you know I hate hospitals, aren’t you?’

‘I … just think we ought to do it. Anyway, I thought you did things like this for your Duke of Edinburgh award or whatever it was.’

‘Yes, but there was some point in that.’

‘We could go towards the end of visiting time so we won’t be there very long. That’s what everyone else does.’

‘Oh, all right,’ said Kasandra.

‘We’d better take her something, too. You have to.’

‘Like grapes, you mean?’

Johnny tried to picture Mrs Tachyon eating grapes. It didn’t work. ‘I’ll think about it.’

The garage door swung back and forth, slowly.

Inside the garage there was:

A concrete floor. It was old and cracked and soaked in oil. Animal footprints crossed it, embedded in the concrete, suggesting that a dog had run across it when it was being laid. This happens in every patch of wet concrete, everywhere. There were also a couple of human footprints, fossilized in time, and now filled with black grease and dust. In other words, it was more or less like any piece of concrete. There was also:

A tool bench.

Most of a bicycle, upside down, and surrounded by tools and bits of bike in a haphazard manner which suggested that someone had mastered the art of taking a bike to bits without succeeding in the craft of putting it back together again.

A lawnmower entangled in a garden hosepipe, which is what always happens in garages, and isn’t at all relevant.

A trolley, overflowing with plastic bags of all kinds, but most particularly six large black ones.

A small pile of jars of pickles, where Johnny had carefully stacked them last night.

The remains of some fish and chips. As far as Guilty was concerned, catfood only happened to other cats.

A pair of yellow eyes, watching intently from the shadows under the bench.

And that was all.

Chapter 3

Bags of Time

To be honest about it, Johnny didn’t much like hospitals either. Mostly, the people he’d gone to visit in them were not going to come out again. And no matter how they tried to cheer the place up with plants and pictures, it never looked friendly. After all, no one was there because they wanted to be.

But Kirsty-Kasandra was good at finding out things and getting harassed people to give her answers, and it didn’t take long to find Mrs Tachyon’s ward.

‘That’s her, isn’t it?’ she said.

She pointed along the line of beds. One or two of them didn’t have visitors around them, but there was no mistaking the one belonging to Mrs Tachyon.

She was sitting up in bed in a hospital night-gown and her woolly hat, over which she had a pair of hospital headphones.