My phone buzzed in my pocket and I snatched it out. A text from Ben.

Are you alone?

9.14 a.m. Ben mob

There was no one about except an old woman walking a dog beside the side of the lake, maybe a hundred metres from me. I studied her for a minute. She gave no indication of even being aware I was there.

I hit reply.

Yes

9.15 a.m. Me

I walked up onto the bridge, feeling exposed as I got to the centre. It had a shallow incline and a waist-high stone parapet. On a different day, it would be nice to come here with William. A different day, a different month, a different year maybe.

Turning 360 degrees, I tried to get my bearings. It was a fair way from the car park, which was invisible on the far side of the trees. Apart from the jogger and the dog walker, I had seen no one. I leaned on the bridge’s stone parapet and looked out across the water of the lake, stirred into small choppy waves by a fresh autumn breeze from the north. The sky was starting to cloud over, and what had been a clear, sunny October day was now threatening to turn darker. My eyes came to rest for a second time on the open-air stage on the other side of the bridge, its walls and angles seeming to offer a natural hiding place.

I walked down off the bridge and tramped through the long grass to the series of concrete semi-circles that formed the theatre seating, each deeper than the next, until I was in a depression in front of the stage. The theatre building itself, a two-storey wooden façade on a one-storey base, was locked and shuttered for the off season. The amphitheatre looked tired and sad and windswept, as if it had been abandoned to the elements now that winter was on its way.

There was no one around. I went back to the middle of the bridge, checked my watch, sent another message.

I’m here

9.18 a.m. Me

I had barely put the phone back in my pocket when the reply came back:

So am I.

9.18 a.m. Ben mob

I spun around, the phone still in my hand, to look behind me.

The path was empty. The open-air theatre still abandoned for the winter. No signs of life. I searched the treeline across the lake from left to right, trying to spot him as my heart thumped harder in my chest.

He has a gun, remember.

Suddenly – now that it was really happening – it occurred to me that coming here on my own, to a half-deserted city park, was maybe not such a good idea. The meeting time I’d given to the police was still more than half an hour away. Maybe they’ll be early.

Maybe not.

Maybe they won’t come at all.