More shouts of sheer distress followed and he saw more feet, with trainers on, stomping around the smashed shell.

‘Help me get him out! Over here!’

Now the heat of the flames came in swirls around his legs and Donald knew he was on fire.

He thought of Elaine, and when their son was born. Henry had been such a large baby that Elaine had torn badly, but her pain had melted away as soon as she took him to her breast and he began to suckle. Henry’s face, now grown into a man’s, filled his memory and his love for his family wrapped around him like a blanket, wishing to shield him from the inevitability of his present circumstance.

Henry at Christmas, introducing his fiancée. Elaine’s tears at her realisation that she was about to lose her son to another, younger, woman. His reassurances that Henry would forever remain theirs. His daughter, Abigail, and her double First from Oxford. Her face when he bought her first car. Her judgement when she learned his secret. Maybe they’d be better off without him.

His body began to shake and the pain seemed to subside, but then return, in waves of nausea and blistering agony. His clothes were alight now. His hand in front of him twisted like a shape shifter, and he realised that it was melting. The calm that overcame him, and the cries of somebody in terrible torment, which, he realised, were his own.

The hull of the ’copter moving with what he assumed was the wind, or perhaps it was the men trying to shove the thing off him. Their last efforts would be forever his comfort. The terror and the damn heat.

He couldn’t breathe, but he didn’t want to.

Then a coolness that he understood as God accepting him as his true son, taking him into the gates of heaven. The sensation of being forgiven.

The white clouds enveloped him and it was wet and sticky. The sound of high pressure squirting. No. This wasn’t right. They were trying to save him. The cold was water and the white clouds were foam. A man’s face close to his, telling him to hang on. The flames disappearing.

In his confused and trauma-fuddled mind, he was surprised at how baffling dying was. He hadn’t known what to expect, because what live human thinks about death and how it feels? But now he saw it as messy, noisy and very wet. If the flames didn’t kill him off soon, then the water of his maker surely would.

A hand around his waist. The relief across his chest as his belt was released.

Then blackness.

Chapter 11