Sitting in his flat only confirmed that he was doing the right thing. For the first time he could see how squalid it was. Filthy mugs of week-old tea, over-flowing ashtrays, the rotten, fetid smell of decay permeating everything – this mess, this obscenity, was his life.

He had everything he needed. Two hundred quid’s worth of smack. It was enough to kill a horse. There’d be some left over for Davo and Carl. He wondered whether they would miss him. Probably for as long as it took to get high from whatever was left. Once that happened they would no more care about James than they would anything else.

That was exactly the problem. All James cared about was the next fix, and he understood now that was no kind of life. He also understood there was no way out of it. He wasn’t strong enough to dig himself out of the hole. His pain went too deep, went back to the day his sister hadn’t come home.

He’d lost more than Maggie that day. He’d woken up a fourteen-year-old boy who messed around with his friends and wondered if he’d ever kiss a girl and thought the world was basically a fun, safe place and he’d gone to bed a fourteen-year-old boy who looked at the world with fear.

He’d gone to bed scared of what was out there, and the fear had never gone away.

Until he took heroin.

So that was his choice. A life lived in fear, the ghost of his sister – who he had loved, had idolized – forever tormenting him, or this. This squalid, filthy flat.

He picked up a needle and straightened his arm. He looked at the vein, anticipated the prick and rush and bliss.

He smiled. Finally, this was the end.

Maggie

She opened the door and looked up the stairs. There was a square of yellow light at the top. She stepped on the first step and glanced over her shoulder.

Max was on the floor and the man was running towards the door.

‘Stop!’ he screamed. ‘Come back here!’

She ran up the stairs. They emerged from a rectangular hole on to the concrete floor of a garage. Next to the hole was a heavy piece of wood, the source of the scraping sound she had heard so often. To her right was a white door. There was a window on her left; rain ran down it.

Rain.

Actual rain.

The garage door was closed, so she ran to the white door. It must lead to the house and then to the outside world.