‘Oh, love. It’s going to be okay.’

He feels his mum’s arms around his shoulders. He leans into her warm body and sucks in her familiar smell.

‘Is this a bad time?’

Mark drops his hands, looks at the two detectives loitering in the doorway and wipes frantically at his cheeks.

‘Mark hasn’t been awake long,’ his mum warns, moving her body slightly to shield Mark from their view, to give him a moment. ‘He’s still quite groggy. The nurse said you were coming, but I can’t remember your names.’

‘DC Stone and DC Worthing,’ Mark hears one of them say. A mix of the voice and the names registers in his misty brain. They’re the same detectives who nicked him on the night Jon died. Christ, this gets worse. He swallows hard and shudders as the equivalent of a Samurai sword slices his throat. He watches the two of them walk into the room and stand at the end of his bed.

‘Hello, Mark. How are you feeling?’

‘Not bad,’ he says stiffly.

‘I hear you were lucky.’

Why does everyone keep saying that? He shrugs and makes some non-committal sound. But he can’t hold their gaze, not now they’ve seen him crying, so he turns to face the window.

‘Listen, I know we’ve had a bit of history,’ the broader one says – DC Stone, Mark remembers. ‘And we will need to have a conversation at some stage about the drugs we found. But you suffered a serious assault last night, and we really want to find out who did this to you.’ His voice is kinder than Mark remembers it. He sighs, risks looking in their vague direction.

‘I don’t remember much.’

‘Just tell us what you can. You were in the disused shop?’ the detective prompts.

‘Yeah.’ He looks at his mum, sighs. She knows this already, but it’s still hard saying it out loud. ‘I’d been smoking a bit of spice. And I’d forgotten to block up the back door. I heard something, and then, lightning fast, there’s someone behind me.’ The words bring the memory into focus and his heart rate increases. Even in this bright, sterile room, fear taps at his skin. He thought he was dying last night. It wasn’t the pain, although that was intense, it was not being able to breathe. Life being sucked out of him.

‘Take your time, Mark.’

He leans over, takes a sip of water. ‘I didn’t even get a chance to turn round. I felt something around my neck, a piece of elastic maybe, and then he was pulling it so tight, I couldn’t breathe.’ Mark blinks, swallows, puts his hand to his neck.

‘The shop looked like there’d been a bit of a struggle,’ DC Worthing says.

Mark shrugs again. He can’t look at his mum. ‘Nah, nothing like that.’