He waited for the paracetamol to seep into his headache and saw again what he realized he’d been watching in his head overnight: the dead little ginger boy with his dog, freed by Jeremy’s mind to play outside the picture’s edges. But Jeremy had not killed him. He was not responsible. Some shame settled on every man, just from having to live, and if you tried to brush it off it would only hang in the air and settle again.

He met the chief outside the dorm and trudged dutifully where he led, uninterested in where they were going. His cheeks were tight where he’d scraped off his stubble. He’d realized while shaving that he needed a new blade and hadn’t brought any. As he wondered how long they would stay here, he felt something flat and compact in his pocket. The sweepstake money. It was only money. Every tenner in England must have been involved in something untoward at some point – drug deals, paying for sex, or even just… The chief brought him up short. ‘Why’s that door open?’

Jeremy stared unthinkingly at the door in question. It angled a few inches from the frame and all that could be seen through the gap was the darkness of an unlit room.

The chief said, ‘If some intoxicated hack has been at the stores, he’d better hope the jihadis get to him before I do.’ He swung the door to the side and clicked the switch. Light jumped into the room and showed broad grey metal shelves bending slowly under boxes of blocky olive-green torches, of batteries, portable radios, signal flares. There were blister-packs holding Swiss Army knives, tough jugs of bleach, sheaves of Ordinance Survey maps with a tray of compasses beside them. Further down were first-aid kits, anti-radiation tablets, tin-foil blankets. On the lowest shelf were hazmat suits, neatly folded so the air-filtering masks were at the top and the attached rubber boots dangled off the front. Two of these had been put on the floor and the centre of each loosened heap of fabric had been crumpled by a round object.

Jeremy asked, ‘Have people been sleeping in here?’

‘Looks that way, doesn’t it, Jezebell-end?’

The chief squatted beside where the sleepers must have lain, inspecting the concrete. Where their feet might have been, he pointed out: ‘Mud. See that? Probably doing more than sleeping. Sexual congress, by the look of things.’ With prudish disgust, he stood up out of his squat, wobbling slightly with the effort. ‘Must have come in last night after the party that never happened. It might have been those two grunts from your pod; did you see them cosying up to each other in front of the fire that was never lit?’