This close, the bus was no longer silent. Through the irregular but constant whooshing of traffic on the motorway above him, he could make out voices. He ducked to see whether he could enter through the space where the front window had been. The aisle, turned through ninety degrees, looked tight and tiny, a crawl-space into a morgue. He noticed the driver’s bruised corpse at his feet and recoiled, stumbling a few paces backwards. The driver was slumped on one arm, as if he’d thrown himself down for a snooze, and his snapped collarbone, strangely yellowed, jutted up through the cheap and shiny material of his uniform shirt. Ken spun away and looked back towards Dan, who was still keeping his distance. Ken tried to shout, but only a hoarse rasp came from his throat. He cleared it and tried again, ‘Dan! Oi, Dan! How many wide shots do you even need? Get over here!’

Emboldened by anger, he turned back to the bus. Using its bent struts for footholds, he clambered up away from the dead driver and on to the bus’s side. The panels felt thin and popped like the lids of jars under his hands and knees, but they held. From this gantry he looked down through the window-spaces into the bus’s belly. Inside, it was already twilight. It seemed few people had been wearing seatbelts and each row of four formed an empty well-shaft at the bottom of which shifted and groaned the mixed-up bodies of the dead and injured.

Ken, feeling dizzy, carefully swivelled to shout back at Dan, but couldn’t see him. He must have come closer, but Ken felt surreally alone beneath the sky. He gathered himself and crawled on. The bus was growing noisier; the survivors at the bottoms of these pits were beginning to cry out in pain. He saw a porky middle-aged woman in a dress still strapped into her seat and dangling lifelessly from the belt. Someone who appeared to be her husband was standing on the lower seats and trying to free her. Looking up at Ken, his nose flattened and blood running down his chin from snapped teeth, he mangled the words: ‘Help me get her out.’ A terrible stink rose from the body and Ken knew the belt hadn’t saved her. Unable to reply, he kept crawling, looking for the black cloth of a burqa.

He found them a few rows back, motionlessly tangled up at the bottom of a row with a young ginger man in a tracksuit. Ken kneeled upright, jimmied the phone from his pocket with trembling hands and told Geraldine. ‘I’ve found them.’

‘Well, are they alive?’

‘I can’t tell.’

‘Go and have a better look then.’

Ken said nothing.

‘Did you hear me, Ken? See what state they’re in. There’s no point just spotting them from across the room.’