Dora had been careful when she sat in the train station’s waiting room to get into pally conversation with a young mother with two lively little kids, one on leading reins, the other still in the pram. Her husband sat silent beside her, not joining in the happy chatter.

‘How old is she? She’s beautiful,’ said Dora, forcing herself to look at the baby, which caused her pain.

She’d been going to have a baby, once. Now it would be a corpse when it popped out. The grief enveloped her again, unstoppable as the tide. This lucky mare had two healthy kids and a loving husband, and what did she have? Nothing.

‘When’s yours due?’ the woman asked Dora.

‘Oh, I’m a while off yet,’ said Dora, smiling because she had to.

Then the little family stood up – the train was coming in. The kid in the pram started bawling its head off, a noise like fingernails down a blackboard to Dora. Wanting to get as far away from them as she possibly could, still Dora gritted her teeth and moved with them, then stood chatting to the woman out on the platform. That was when she saw him – Donny Maguire was sitting not twenty feet away. Feeling her heart beating sickly in her chest, Dora kept close to the family, kept talking to the mother and tickling the bawling infant under his chin, made it look like she was part of their little group. Maybe a plain sister, out for the day with her rellies.

She was wearing a black coat she’d bought in one of the cheaper Harrogate stores, her dark hair was scraped back in a bun, she wore heavy black-rimmed glasses. Christ, she didn’t even think her own mother would recognize her! But Donny was a copper and they were clever. So she endured ten minutes of standing there, exposed, while chattering away nineteen to the dozen to the woman with the husband and the two kids. Then when the train was in, she piled on board with them.

Once seated, Dora didn’t dare turn her face fully to the window to see him still sitting there, hawk-eyed, scanning all the faces in the hope of seeing hers amongst them. She sat near the little family group, although she really wanted to get away from them because their happiness made her own situation unbearable.

She was alone.

She was carrying a dead baby.

And now Donny Maguire was hunting her down. And probably that monster Bruno Graves too.

When the train drew out of the station, she slumped in her seat, drained by tension. The young mother was still jabbering on to her, thinking she’d found a friend. As soon as Harrogate vanished behind them, Dora said she felt ill and needed the loo, after which she moved to the other end of the carriage.

Once at York, Dora didn’t linger. She went straight over to the office and bought a ticket to Blackpool. She went into the café and sat there nursing a single cup of coffee until the train came in. Then she climbed aboard, and she was off.