The inside of me was full of cold air and my breath shallow, as if I had just swallowed a mouthful of crushed ice. I had a moment of doubt, then. It was the hands in pockets, the stillness of the figure. Was it Matty? Or was it someone who had come out from the Portakabin to see what I was doing? The moment rushed through me, as quickly as a high-speed express. The face was lost in darkness – but I knew that whoever it was, he had seen me.

I turned, ran along the access road and within seconds reached the end – there was a gate in the fence that led onto the tracks to my right and I ran up to it and put my hands on the cold hard metal but knew before I pulled that it would be securely locked. To my left, there was a junkyard. The fence that bordered it was a saggy wire mesh in a diamond pattern, curled and bent along the top and held loosely in place by old concrete posts – some residents of the housing estate in the distance had used the yard as a short cut, I guessed. I pulled at the wire mesh, dragging it towards me and down, lowering it with ease. I swung a leg over and was inside the yard without looking back along the slip road.

On my right, there was a row of rusting yellow skips; on my left, some vast metal tubs full of chunks of concrete in long thin shapes; beyond, a stack of old wooden pallets, next to it a pile of sheet metal with jagged edges, some upended wooden sidings, a heap of something that looked like rusted engine parts. There had to be a way through at the far end of the yard. I stepped behind one of the skips, stumbling again on the rough ground, paused and listened.

My breath made clouds in the air. There was the distant hum of a generator of some sort from the direction of the Portakabin. From the station, I heard the fox bark once again, then nothing. The ground was so rough, I would hear his footsteps if he was following me. Would he really come after me in here? Did his headlights catch me as I took a left and ran down towards the depot? Was it even him I saw?

I leaned forward so that I could peer around the skip. I could see right up the access road and the path that ran alongside it: there was no one there. Could I have imagined someone standing and staring at me, hands in the pockets of his big grey parka?