In the street outside her flat she thought at first that the Mini would refuse to start. It spluttered and choked and she explained to it, more loudly and obscenely with every twist of the key in the ignition, that she needed this story, she really needed it. At last the engine turned over. As she looked in the mirror before driving off, she thought she saw the back of someone in the front garden of the house where she had her bedsit. She thought for an instant that it was Max, but when she looked again behind her, the figure had gone. Then she told herself that she was losing her mind. She was tired and she had made the image up. It was the postman or that strange man who lived on the ground floor who always went into the garden to clean his shoes. But all day as she drove around the region following her story, asking her questions, becoming more alarmed and triumphant about the answers she received, she had the sense of a shadow behind her. She never saw anyone. She did not even think that she was being followed. It was that someone knew where she was going and arrived there first, that he was following the workings, the logic of her mind. You’re imagining things, she thought. You’re so desperate to have this story to yourself that you’re imagining the competition.

The drunk driver had his own business in a new glass-and-plastic factory on the industrial estate to the west of Otterbridge. He made valves, he told her. She gathered it was something to do with the oil trade, deep-sea diving. He sat in his cluttered office and explained it all in detail, hoping, she supposed, for a feature that would give him free advertisement, but she did not take it in. He offered to take her round the workshop and she went because she thought it would please him. He had a daughter, he said, not much younger than her, a student. She seemed to remind him of his daughter, and when he offered to take her out for lunch, she accepted, thinking she might get more out of him when he had drunk a couple of pints.

“Only the pub over the road,” he said, grinning. “ I can’t take you into town. Not now. I have to get a taxi home and back.” Then, suddenly and lonely: “My wife’s left me, you know. She said the publicity was the last straw. I hope my daughter will keep in touch all the same.”