I waited on the canal bridge. It was dusk and turning a bit nippy. I shivered, and it wasn’t just the cold. I was thinking about Ginger, and Tanya who liked to be called Toya, and her dad who said bless you and shoved a fiver in my hand. I was thinking about Gail, too – how she’d changed my life for the better, but how, whenever I thought of her, a faint unease would stir somewhere deep inside – a sensation I strove to smother or ignore. A cool chick, Nick had called her, but it wasn’t quite that. She was cool, but there was something else – a sort of poise; a self-possession which jarred with her circumstances. It seems a funny thing to say, but she wasn’t screwed up enough. I must have known, too, deep down, but I kept shoving it away. If it was a dream it was a warm dream, and I didn’t want to wake.

She was back in a few minutes, smiling. ‘Nine Mornington Place,’ she chirped, shouldering her pack. I nodded but didn’t say anything and we set off along the High Street.

It was a biggish, three-storey house in a short Victorian terrace. There was a minute, sour-looking front garden in which three dustbins took up most of the space. There was no gate. A short path led from the gateway to the white door. No light showed in any of the windows.

‘Nobody home,’ said Gail. We were standing in the shadow of some budding sycamores across the street.

‘Let’s hang about a bit,’ I murmured. Looking at the place made me shiver. The video inside my skull came on, and I saw Ginger following a shadowy figure up to that white door. Is that how it happened, I wondered. When, exactly? Where was I at that moment? and why had Ginger followed him – Ginger and Toya and possibly others. Why?

Gail had a watch. We waited forty-five minutes. Nobody went in, nobody came out. A woman kept coming to a lighted upstairs window next door, seeming to look straight at us. She probably couldn’t even see us, but it made us nervous. If you’re homeless it’s not smart to be found loitering in a residential area, especially after dark, and she just might phone the police. ‘Come on,’ I said. ‘We’ll try again tomorrow.’

Sunday we were back under the sycamores by half eight. It was dry but the sun was still behind the houses so it was nippy, too. All the curtains were closed at number nine. I wished me and Gail were having a lie-in like the bastards in those rooms. A good night’s sleep in a comfy bed, a lie-in till about ten and a breakfast of eggs and bacon, toast and coffee, eaten slowly in a warm kitchen. Paradise, and millions take it completely for granted.