He’s going mad. He can’t get any air. He gulps. He’s breathing, he thinks he’s breathing, but it doesn’t feel like he is. What the fuck, what the fuck, what the fuck? He leans forward, his hands on the table. The pancakes are two round shapes in front of him, filling his entire field of vision. Pancakes and panic. ‘I can’t breathe,’ he says to Cathy.

She looks at him gently. ‘You are breathing,’ she says in a low voice.

‘I can’t do it. I’m going to die,’ he says. His chest is tight. He really can’t breathe. He really actually is not breathing.

‘All right, come on, out of here,’ Cathy says calmly. She leads him out of the dining area, through the fire door at the back, propped open so it lets a rectangle of sunshine in. Joe holds up a hand to Lydia, telling her he’ll be back soon. They stand there together. ‘In for five,’ Cathy says, her eyes on Joe’s.

Is he breathing? How would he know? Will he ever feel normal again?

‘Out for seven,’ she says.

‘I don’t have seven.’

‘This will pass,’ she says nicely. ‘Okay?’

‘No, this one is different.’

‘You always say that.’

‘We’ve kil–’

‘Stop. Breathe.’

Already, Joe can feel the adrenaline burning dry, like a kettle boiling empty and switching off. There’s nothing more in him. His limbs feel exhausted.

Panic attacks. He’s had them before. Hundreds of them. Cathy’s the best person to talk him down from them, not because she takes them seriously but because she doesn’t give them credence, doesn’t fear them like he does.

‘In for five,’ she says calmly, a half-smile playing across her features. ‘Some things don’t change,’ she adds.

She leans a hand on the bar of the fire door and glances over her shoulder, inside. ‘Pancakes have burned.’

A car door slams around the side of the building where the main entrance is. It’s a white-stone building, almost too bright to look at. Snowflakes dance in Joe’s vision when he tries. The palette of the day is a royal-blue and clean, intense white. It helps, the contrast between this and the brown and the red of the night before last.

Another car door. A dull, metallic thump. Joe turns instinctively towards the noise. He can’t see, so he looks at Cathy, waiting for a clue. She is staring just behind his shoulder again. She’s lit up by the sun, her skin peach-coloured, her hair caramel, eyes a bright oak. But it’s her expression he can’t stop looking at. Eyebrows drawn together. Mouth slack.

‘Don’t look,’ she says in just a whisper. He turns around anyway. His muscles are tensed, ready.

‘What? The police?’ he says, looking back at Cathy. She brings a hand to her mouth.

‘No.’

‘What?’

Joe steps back, joining her. They stand there, together, side by side, and stare.

‘Cane corsos,’ Cathy says. A breed of sniffer dog.

25.

Joe

There are tens of them, the cadaver dogs. Each on a lead, each with a police officer, each straining to go. They’re large, black dogs, like a Staffordshire bull terrier but on taller legs. Joe treated one, last year, brought in by a Spanish man who lived in Kings Heath. It had eaten the skin of a tennis ball, according to the man, in one whole gulp. He’d made the noise of it, the gulp. Unk. The dog needed a big operation. Recovered well. He could smell Joe coming through the prep room into the dog ward. He would always be looking up when he arrived, nose quivering.