Jamie queued at the buffet counter, swaying to keep his balance as the train rattled and vibrated. The man in front of him seemed to be on a mission to sample everything on the menu and was taking an age. Still, Jamie didn’t mind. They had plenty of time to kill.

He had been looking forward to this trip. Not just because of what would happen at the end of it, but because for the first time in months he would have some ‘dead’ time. To him, that was one of the best things about going on a journey somewhere, being stuck on a plane or a train: you had five or six hours to spend in this unreal zone between points A and B; time in which to think or read or just stare at the scenery. The train would reach Carlisle in five hours time, which meant – with nothing to distract him – he had five hours to think, to mull over recent events, to try to get things straight in his mind.

Over the last few days, Kirsty’s mood had improved amazingly, her cool serenity, which had taken the place of her edginess, had in turn been replaced by a perceptible happiness. Jamie was pleased but confused. She had Heather on the phone every evening, crying and cursing men, Paul in particular, wondering out loud what she had done wrong. Then there was Paul himself, who had announced that he didn’t want any visitors apart from his parents, not until he was fully recovered, anyway. Kirsty had gone to see him at the end of a long shift, persuading her way past the nurse who acted as a kind of bouncer for Paul, but he had refused to speak to her, closing his eyes and pretending to be asleep. Jamie was furious when Kirsty told him, but she had simply shrugged and said, ‘If it’s what he wants.’

Then, of course, there was the continuing harassment from the Newtons. Lucy had written them another letter, saying that the sound of Kirsty thrashing the toilet brush round the pan on a Sunday afternoon, when they had been doing their weekly housework, had been intolerable. It was one of those letters that, at first, made Jamie laugh. But after reading it a couple of times it struck him how insane the writer must be, and he felt scared. Kirsty, however, had simply shrugged and said, ‘I’ll just have to thrash a bit more quietly, won’t I?’