I look past Lockhart’s head at the map on the wall. It is A3 size, fixed to the wall by big lumps of Blu-tack at each corner and smaller lumps along the edge, as if Blu-tack became rationed after the corners were stuck. Greasy marks leak through the paper. It is a map of the station, blown up large, and the surrounding area. Around the station is a line in blue crayon. It traces a boundary that includes the freight depot and sidings at the back, the car park and the BTP offices at the front. It doesn’t include Waitrose or the Great Northern Hotel. Inspector Barker has a similar map on the wall of his office upstairs; a neater, smaller one. Whenever I look at the maps, I feel troubled without understanding why. Maybe it’s for the same reason that the name Leyla pops into my head whenever I look at Lockhart: the flashes, the images I get from time to time, the picture of the elderly woman sitting on the edge of a bed in a nightie.

*

I drift outside, up and down Station Approach for a bit, half doze, and when I come to again, I’m still hanging around outside the station and the football fans have been and gone and it is almost dusk.

Dusk is a difficult time: it comes; again it comes; it comes again. I don’t mind the dark. You know where you are at nighttime, it’s very simple: it’s night. Even if you hate the night – and I don’t, not any more – the fact that you are in it means it is already passing. You just have to hang on until dawn.

Dusk is different. At first, when the light begins to fade, it might just be a cloudy day – we all know how depressing grey days are. But it gets gloomier, and gloomier still, as if the sky is saying, look, it isn’t just cloudy, sucker, it’s dusk. That strange half-light before the night falls – I hate it. Even though the streetlights have started to come on, the world is undefined: there is no sense of the dark bits and the light bits, just a grey gauze over everything, like a fog or a mist, or as if there is something on your cornea. The edges of buildings are blurred; even other people seem ill-defined as they rush past. It involves a lot of peering.