Upon waking, the panic had instantly closed around him like a fog. A small woman had tried to hold him down, but he’d fought like any caged animal fearing pain, desperate to rip away the tubes filling his blood with poison, and it had taken the additional input of a large man to finally subdue him. He had been aware of his voice, somewhat disconnected from his brain, screaming, Who the hell are you?

‘A friend called Fitch Angeles. For a job.’

‘A job? Explain, please,’ the woman called Detective Chief Inspector Lucy Miller said.

The small woman had been trying to soothe him with soft words, long sentences, but nothing had worked until the large man had yelled one little word right into his ear from an inch away: ‘HOSPITAL’.

‘I lost my job a couple of weeks ago.’ He indicated Anna. ‘We had an argument and I was stomping about at work. I nearly dropped heavy piping on to a guy’s head. I got let go. I was calling a mate who owns a limo company for a job.’

As if the man’s breath had pulsed through his brain like wind and swept away the fog, clarity descended in an instant. Not some madman’s laboratory, and not tubing pumping poison. A hospital. His jigsaw memory pieces knit together fast, and as the whole solidified, his body relaxed.

‘And you didn’t know he’d lost his job?’ the male, Detective Sergeant Liam Bennet, asked Anna.

She shook her head, looking horrified.

‘You were scared of telling me?’ she asked Nick.

He gave a childlike slow nod with his eyes looking anywhere but at her. ‘I wanted to get another job before I told you. So you wouldn’t worry.’

‘You should have told me. It would have been fine. I wouldn’t have been angry. So you were going out every day, pretending to work?’

‘In America?’ the detective cut in. ‘You wanted a job in America?’

‘The job isn’t in America. It’s in Nottingham. A bit of a drive, but it would have been a stopgap.’

‘That’s why your van isn’t there,’ Anna said, somewhat gleeful about this. She gave the detectives an accusing stare, which confused Nick.

‘Yeah, they took it back,’ he said. ‘Since I always parked it around on the back street, I figured you wouldn’t know it wasn’t there.’