She came up to me then. There was a faint smell of something medicinal about her, camphor or eucalyptus. She placed a hand on my arm and looked up into my face – I’m short but she was tiny. ‘You do not have to put up. I know, now. They told me.’ She gazed into my eyes.

The cat had followed her. Not knowing what to say, I bent towards it with my hand extended, miming piano playing with my fingers. Mrs Abaza looked down at it and made a fierce hissing sound between her teeth. The cat shot back into her flat.

She looked up at me and took her hand off my arm. ‘My name is Leyla,’ she snapped, then went back into her flat, closing the door behind her.

*

It was three weeks before I died that it happened, the premonition – no, premonition is too strong a word. Premonition suggests I knew what was going to happen and of course if I had known that I was going to die, I would have done something about it. Nobody would willingly hurtle towards a fate like mine if they had the power to avert it. Foreknowledge of what awaited me on Peterborough Railway Station would have had me packing a bag and going straight to the bus depot – hitchhiking even, or getting a taxi to another town. I could have gone to East Midlands or Norwich Airport or even down south, to Stansted or Luton. I could have got an Easyjet flight – hell, if I had known I was fleeing for my life, I might have even risked Ryanair. I would have sat on the runway, waiting for the plane to take off, as nervous as any gangland drug dealer fleeing justice, waiting for the wheels to lift me up from the cold hard earth knowing I would never set foot on it again. Lisbon. Istanbul. Magaluf. It wouldn’t have mattered – wherever I was in the world, once I knew that Platform Seven was the place of my doom, then all I would have had to do was stay well away from it. My parents would have missed me but there’s always Skype.

So, no, there was no premonition as such. On that mild March night, three weeks before I met my fate, I didn’t know what was going to happen as such. There was something, though, a moment in which I saw the reality of my situation. I felt what was to come skim past me – as if I were standing on the edge of a cliff and a huge gull swooped low over my head, not touching me but communicating the brush of its wings through a disturbance in the air.

*