I suppose if I hunted around Peterborough I could find plenty of other others – I’m avoiding the station itself, where Thomas Warren is still trapped, and the multi-storey car park with its grey malice. That one is still blurry, formless – it sounds like an odd thing to say, but I’m not sure it’s dead. I think there are probably hundreds of different types of others, if the truth be told. I think the living inhabitants of Peterborough wander around with no idea there is a parallel universe walking right next to them, through them. Well, maybe some of them know.

I want to say goodbye to the living too, as best I can, but I have one more special journey to make before I can. I am hoping she won’t be there, but I know she will be – that’s why I have to give it a try. If Lockhart did it for me, maybe I can do it for her.

*

I’m not rushing in the way I was that summer’s day when I was en route to meet Katie at the Showcase. I take my time as I drift down Star Road, going slowly because I’m coming from the opposite direction and it’s dark and I don’t want to miss the house. They are all very similar but I remember that the one I’m looking for had a concrete plant pot in the front garden, a wide thing filled with weeds, the kind you’d leave in your front garden for years, always intending to plant something.

It’s still there, and in the dark, the grey circle of the plant pot glows pale. I look up at the cheap sash window, which has no curtains or blind. It looks uninhabited and it is – but she is there, in the window: Donna Carlton.

It’s almost as if she’s been waiting for me. She isn’t at the bottom of the window, like she was before, her face staring out and her eyes large with desperation. She is standing up, in the middle of the window frame, as if it is the border of an oil portrait. She is wearing a loose, beige-coloured dress – I’m not sure if it’s a dress or a nightie. Her hair is brown, unwashed, I can see from here, drawn back into a loose ponytail. She doesn’t look much like her photograph in the Weekend Journal, it must have been an old one – but she is alike enough for me to have recognised her when Matty made sure I saw that report. Something in the eyes.

I go up to the window to take a better look – that’s something I couldn’t do last time. She watches me as I rise.