He queued at a petrol station. Fifteen minutes; not as bad as he’d feared, and there was still some supply. He got Jack to fill the tank while he limped inside. He tried to pay with a credit card. The tills were working but the operator wouldn’t take his card; there was no line to the card operators. No phone lines either; it sounded as if a telephone exchange had gone down.

Christ, he thought. Lose a telephone exchange and suddenly you can’t buy petrol. Everything has got too complex. Too interlinked. We’re too fragile.

He paid in cash, and through the nose too, the sharks.

The traffic moved a little more easily once they reached the A1 past Duddingston, heading east. But at the roundabout at Bingham they ran into a queue of traffic, all of it heading east. It was like holiday traffic, cars crammed with kids and grandparents and pets and luggage.

The westbound carriageway was kept empty, save for fuel trucks and emergency vehicles which raced into the city. The traffic inched forward, so slowly he wasn’t sure if it was really moving, or just compressing.

A couple of cars ahead, he saw a driver, a fat middle-aged man in a suit, get out to look up the road for the obstruction. He slammed his fist into the roof of his car with frustration, and yelled at somebody in the car. His wife, maybe.

The day was getting hotter.

The western horizon, in the rear view mirror, was turned orange by a smudge of smoke and dust, underlit here and there by the crimson glow of fires.

Ted tried the radio, looking for some guidance from the police. But there was only a stream of lurid on-the-spot reports from the trouble spots in the city, which didn’t do either of them a damn bit of good, so he pressed buttons until he found what sounded to his antique ears like a modern pop station, and left the radio there.

It took an hour to move the half-mile or so to the next roundabout. There were police in yellow ponchos, he saw, walking into the traffic stream and directing it; all the exits from the roundabout save one had been blocked off by police cars, their lights flashing.

A tall black policeman — just a kid — reached the car.

“What’s going on, officer?”

“When you get to the front of the queue, follow the diversion signs, sir—”

“What diversion?”

“To the college at Brunstane, the Jewel. That’s designated as the Evacuation Assembly Point.”

“What?”

“You can park your car in the side streets there. You have to register with the Police Casualty Bureau, and transport will be laid on to take you to the Rest Centres.”

“Transport laid on?” He slapped the steering wheel. “What do you call this?”