There aren’t many people heading south at that hour. Strung out along the platform, singly or in twos, men and women huddle in the cold, coats buttoned. As I sit waiting, there is a distant noise to my right and then a huge clamour and all at once a goods train arrives – the size and sound of it, vast and all-consuming, thundering and screeching as it speeds past – then, in an instant, it is gone. The only sign of it having passed through is a white plastic bag a few feet above the tracks, dancing in the air. It comes to me, then, what is so fine about death’s inevitability – in the face of it, we carry on. Every single one of us walks around with that knowledge, inside ourselves, like a lump of lead, and yet we rise each morning and we hug our partners and our children and our feet go clack-clack on the pavement to work, each stroke could be ringing out the sound of our impending doom, we could all drop dead of a heart attack at any moment or be about to cross the road at the wrong time, but no, it is a hopeful sound. In the face of it all, we keep our heads high: and even though I’m dead and gone, there will be more and more of us, and even if I was forgotten then every nice thing I had done, every smile I had offered, would live on inside someone else and that is the way you are triumphed over, Death. Be off with you, freight train. You are defeated by wave after wave of us and every little thing we do for one another.

‘The next train to arrive on Platform THREE, is the ten, thirty, NINE to London King’s Cross. Calling at. Stevenage. And. London King’s Cross.’

Here it is. It’s almost here. I’m so excited.

My ashes lie in Eastfield Cemetery but they are just my remains. I am here. I have neither flesh nor bone but I have consciousness and I can still feel love – I can feel love for myself and I can feel the love of others. It is the love of others keeping me conscious – not the crazed passion I felt for Matthew or the self-serving desire he felt for me – not even the raw neediness I felt for Andrew or the yearning for Dalmar. The love that keeps me is the daily, ordinary love that Melissa and Tom and Dalmar and all the others on the station feel for each other, and their families; the love that Inspector Barker feels for his fellow ukulele players; the sense of duty and the desire to serve the public that PC Akash Lockhart lives by – that is the love that set me free.