When you don’t have a body, time is no longer even or consistent: it stretches and bends, folds in on itself. A moment watching someone walk along a railway platform becomes a decade. Two years pass in a flash. It’s a bit like gazing at an electronic information board. The minutes on it bear no relation to real minutes – sometimes you stare and stare at the letters and numbers that represent your train for what feels like hours, and nothing happens. At other times, the display seems to jump from saying you have twenty minutes until your train to telling you it’ll be here in two, better run. My whole life is like that. Life – I use the word in its loosest sense. My whole time would be more accurate. I don’t have a life any more: I just have time.

The clocks went back last week. An hour lost; an hour gained – when we lose that hour in the spring, we are supposed to feel joyful that summer is coming: the lighter evenings, songbirds and all that, but a lost hour is a whole hour that has fallen down a crack. What if that hour was the hour when you might have bought the lottery ticket that would have transformed your life, or met your one true love? What if it was the hour when you made the best decision of your life? You’re never going to get that hour back, it’s gone – live to ninety-six and that’s a whole four days you’ve lost. The hour you gain in the winter isn’t your lost hour from earlier in the year, reappearing. That hour isn’t a gift. It is time cracking open, bulging and splitting, wide enough for all manner of things to crawl out. The next day, you will be plunged into darkness at 5 p.m. and even though you knew it was coming, it still feels sudden. Things are walking abroad that weren’t there before and the long British winter stretches ahead. From now on, it will get darker and darker. And at 4 a.m., it is darkest of all.

*

They don’t even cancel the 06.10 to Birmingham New Street. That isn’t how it works.

As soon as Tom puts the call through to the Fatality Hotline, the trains are stopped. The next thing he does, because he knows them and has the direct line, is phone through to the British Transport Police offices in the small brick house next to the car park. It is less than a minute from the station’s main entrance.