Jane and Jack had reentered the national database of refugees at the Rest Centre they stopped at in Berwick. If you could call it a Rest Centre. The second-wave evacuation camp was a crude tent city, hordes of people clustered around medic tents and food trucks, malnutrition and disease and open sewers. A Third World scene, in prosperous Scotland. It took twenty-four hours after they arrived there for a policeman to come find them, and drive them out to a field on the edge of town, where an Army Air Corps helicopter was waiting for them.

They were to be flown to the US, thanks to some obscure string-pulling by Henry, and, she suspected, his ex-wife. She wasn’t about to argue.

But air traffic, even the military stuff, was utterly screwed up, because of the pressure the flood of refugees was putting on the requisitioned commercial fleets and military transport, and because of the mess the Midland Valley disturbances had made of the air space there.

So Jane had found herself hopped over to Prestwick by an Army Air Corps Gazette — actually, that had been rather fun, especially for Jack — and now here she was on an ageing 747, a British Airways airliner crammed with Scottish families, part of the great flood of refugees fleeing Britain, eight hundred of her fellow citizens seeking succour in a foreign land.

She got a seat in First Class, and, remarkably, the crisp, rather snooty BA stewardesses in here were still serving champagne before the take-off.

But even here, the cabin was crowded with refugees, adults and squalling infants and grumbling, distressed old people; the overhead lockers overflowed with hastily packed suitcases, even carrier bags. There was great distress, in some cases from injury, more often because of what had been left behind: family members, mothers and sons and grandparents, even pets; homes that had been the focus of lives for, in some cases, decades.

Waiting for take-off, Jack buried his nose in a book, and Jane receded into herself.

She ran a poll of her anatomy, her stomach and breasts and throat; surreptitiously she checked the moles on her legs.

She hated being so aware of her body. So frightened of it, in fact. So far she’d found little to concern her, little she couldn’t dismiss as hypochondriac overreaction. But nevertheless she had been exposed, with Jack, to whatever foul sleet had come pumping out of Torness, when she had taken them both blundering past so carelessly.

Maybe she deserved to soak up the hard rain, for her stupidity. Not Jack, though. Not Jack.

She watched him while he slept, inspected him too. She didn’t want to voice her concerns, for fear of frightening him — or perhaps, she thought, for superstition, as if the evil when uttered might become real.