Finally, he drifted to sleep recalling how many times his mother had spoken to him when he knew she wasn’t there. He could hear her voice plainly, even now. It was a reality he couldn’t deny, a truth that defied logic. It was a sound snatched from the past, and trapped inside his head.

Four hours later, Cooper woke in a panic. He felt as though he couldn’t move. A great weight was pressing on his chest, pinning him to the bed. He knew he was in that indefinable place between sleeping and waking, and he wanted to cry out, but he couldn’t make his lungs work. Somewhere nearby a voice was speaking to him, but it was mumbling too indistinctly for him to hear the message.

And then suddenly he broke through a barrier, and shot upright in bed with a wordless shout. Randy flew off his chest, a resentful yowl filling the bedroom.

Cooper found he was sweating, and his heart was thumping. There was a burning pain in his arm, too. Was this what it was like when you had a heart attack? Should he phone for an ambulance, or wait and see what happened? He was only thirty, too young to die of heart failure.

It took him a few minutes to calm down. When he was breathing more slowly, he put on the light and checked his arm. He discovered it was covered with little claw marks, where the cat had been mauling him during the night. If the skin was broken, the scratches would get infected. A cat’s claws were never entirely clean.

The mumbling he’d heard might have been the cat, too. Or it might have been the rain he could hear hitting the roof of the conservatory. It must have started while he was asleep.

Half an hour later, the rain eased off, and finally stopped. By then, Cooper was sitting in his kitchen with a cup of coffee on the table, waiting for the light to seep through the windows.

It was barely dark when he got the call. ‘You know what you have to do, Johnny. It’s time.’

He didn’t need to ask any questions. He recognized the voice straightaway, and he knew the instruction was something he had to act on. And he had to do it now. ‘Yes, it’s time. It’s time.’