Dr Wickramasinghe said, ‘Thanks, Angela. I’d just like to say first of all that you are an extremely good-looking and talented interviewer! Well, we can’t account for it at this stage. If this hospital alone was involved, I’d say we’d just had a good day – it’s not unheard of to have a twenty-four-hour period in which no one dies. But two things make this very strange indeed. First, several colleagues have told me of individual cases involving terminally ill patients who really seemed unlikely to make it through this last day, but every single one of them has hung on. But second, and this is the truly amazing thing, it appears that no hospital in the country or – and this seems frankly incredible – in the world has reported any deaths for this period. That’s got to be more than just a freak statistic.’

‘So what’s your explanation?’

‘That’s a great question, Angela. But I don’t have an explanation.’

‘Could it be that, well, people have just stopped dying? We might all live for ever?’

‘Well, that’s impossible, of course.’

‘So what’s the explanation then?’

‘I told you, I don’t have one.’

The interviewer looked a bit kind of nonplussed. ‘This is Angela Crudgington in East London. Back to you in the studio, Martin.’

‘Thank you, Angela. I have with me the very intelligent and extremely nice population expert Dr Timothy Wendover, from the University of East Anglia.’

The guy with him looked like a typical eccentric professor, with a wild, unruly beard and a small pair of glasses which sat crookedly on his nose. ‘Good evening,’ he said. ‘I really like your tie, by the way. That’s a very attractive pattern, good choice.’

‘Thanks very much. It’s really kind of you. So, Dr Wendover, this is something quite unprecedented, isn’t it?’

‘It is totally unprecedented. Usually, something of the order of forty thousand people die, worldwide, every hour. The idea that even for an hour nobody would die is frankly bizarre – and a whole day seems outright impossible. And yet that is apparently the case. Assuming these early reports are reliable. And they do seem to be.’

‘So it has come as a total surprise – there were no indications of a decrease in death rates prior to this?’

The professor swept the suggestion away with both hands and his glasses slipped down his nose a bit further. ‘Not at all. In fact, there has actually been an upward trend in deaths per day, as the world population continues to grow. This has come out of nowhere and we have no way of accounting for it.’

‘Could it be connected with improved medical care – better medicines and hygiene standards . . .?’