I go out into the street, as low as I have ever been, my head full of Dalmar’s distress, his inability to forgive himself and my inability to communicate to him that none of it is his fault – least of all what happened to me. I wish I had never remembered anything about my past and I wish I didn’t know about Dalmar’s. To live in a world where such things happen – I’m glad I’m dead. Dalmar is right to hide himself away. All is known now; all is finished. Matty caused my death and lied about it and he got away with it. He is living with his new girlfriend in Longthorpe and soon she will be pregnant with his child. Andrew and Ruth have paid their last homage to their father on Platform Seven and are now trying to get on with their lives. PC Lockhart has completed his investigations, to no effect, and is wondering whether CID is for him. He is trying to pretend he hasn’t fallen for Melissa because he needs another unattainable beauty in his thoughts like he needs a hole in his head. Dalmar feels bad about Angela and Angela feels even worse about Dalmar. Inspector Barker has yet to take his new ukulele to rehearsal, despite Tom’s repeated requests, nor has he owned up to his wife about its purchase. It’s all shit. The world is shit. I wish I was still trapped on the station with no memory, half asleep, in blissful and interminable ignorance.

*

I can’t face going back there now, so I turn down Bright Street and head towards the city centre – Peterborough town, with its occasional and lovely old stone buildings hanging on in the midst of all the seventies and eighties crap, and once upon a time the crap was incongruous but it’s all rubbish now and the nice old buildings are the incongruous ones. It’s called progress.

It is December. As the light fades, the reds and oranges and yellows of the Christmas lights come into their own. It’s the office party season and there are people out on the street – some of them look like they have been at it all afternoon. Men have inane grins and tinsel wrapped round their skulls. Women who would never be seen dead in a red dress all year round have discovered their inner Santa. It’s all one last desperate gasp of fake fun and consumerism and it’s pointless, I think: the expense, the false bonhomie, the waste – in their hearts, people know it is pointless. And all it will mean to me is more of the dark.

I turn onto the pedestrian drag full of bitterness and hopelessness: and then, I see her.