Fry could see he was worried, but she didn’t know what to say to him. Cooper wouldn’t welcome any interest from her in his personal life – especially after what she’d said to him about his interference in her life, when he’d secretly schemed to reunite her with her sister. Whatever she said now, he would only consider it intrusive and hypocritical.

She cast around for something neutral to say that wouldn’t make things worse.

‘Well, don’t hang around the office,’ she said. ‘We can manage without you for a while, you know. Go and get things sorted out, if you can.’

She didn’t think Cooper was going to respond. But then he got up slowly.

‘I’ll see you in the morning, Diane.’

Fry put her headphones back on and returned to her tapes. Half an hour had passed before it occurred to her to wonder what Cooper would do after he’d visited his sick mother.

It might happen in the next few hours. We could synchronize our watches and count down the minutes. What a chance to record the ticking away of a life, to follow it through to that last, perfect moment, when existence becomes nothing, when the spirit parts with the physical. The end is always so close … I can smell it right now, can’t you?

But Cooper had given himself a job to do that night. While he’d been waiting for visiting time to come round at the hospital, he’d driven to the big DIY store on the retail park and bought himself a flat-pack shelving unit. It was something he’d been meaning to do for months. Well, he certainly needed something to distract his mind, to prevent the phrase ‘recurrent stroke’ from slipping so often into his thoughts, spoken softly and accompanied by a meaningful look or a sympathetic nod at the unspoken implication.

Tonight, his mother had been conscious and lucid, though her right side was partially paralysed and her sight impaired. For some time now, she’d been losing her colour and she was paler than he could ever remember her. Looking at her in the hospital bed, it had seemed no surprise to Cooper that the blood had failed to reach the left side of her brain. Matt was right, of course, that she wasn’t all that old – still in her sixties, after all. But tonight she’d seemed much older.

Randy’s ear pricked up, and a second later the doorbell rang. At this time of the evening, Cooper always assumed that it was somebody ringing the wrong bell. They usually wanted his neighbour in the flat upstairs or his landlady next door.

But when he reluctantly got up and went to answer the bell, it was Gavin Murfin he found standing on his doorstep.