Light came slowly into his world of darkness. But just before light came sound. Distant at first, then jumbled, unrecognizable. Until gradually it grew clearer. Feet moving across wooden floorboards, the rustle of cloth on cloth, a woman’s voice. Words he could not understand. As awareness increased he began to register smells, odours evocative of distant memories. The musk of a woman’s perfume, the smell of hot food, cigarette smoke.

He opened his eyes and light flooded his head in a startling, swimming brightness. He screwed them tight shut and then eased them open more slowly. Where was he? He felt warm and stiff, and all around a delicious softness caressed his skin. Above him he saw a white plaster ceiling supported by black painted beams. A woman’s face peered down at him and smiled. It was a round, pleasant face. She spoke to him, but he could not understand. Her head turned away and she spoke to someone else that he could not see. Consciousness had fully returned now, and with it came a pounding pain in his head. His body ached and he found it almost impossible to move.

With a great effort he pulled himself up on his elbows to lower his horizon. Beyond the end of the bed du Maurier sat on a hard-backed wooden chair, watching him. He wore the same hat and coat as when he’d last seen him, the same weariness etched deeply in the lines of his face. His dark eyes stared sadly back at Bannerman.

The woman bent over Bannerman, blocking the policeman from view, and she plumped the pillow behind his back so that he was supported to sit half upright in the bed. Then she had a bowl of hot soup at his lips. He accepted it gratefully and took rapid gulps of the hot, thick liquid, allowing a little of it to spill from the corners of his mouth in his haste. It tasted good in a way that nothing had ever tasted before. It filled him with a core of warmth that seemed to radiate outwards to reach every part of him. He finished it and let the bowl drop away from his mouth, suddenly self-conscious of the eyes that were on him. And with that self-consciousness came memory, of the events of . . . he knew not how long ago. The red dot, the choking gas in the moonlit bedroom, the agonizing chase across the snowy wastes, the remains of the man in the crater. The rest was hazy. Staggering through the snow, the lights on the road. He held out the bowl and the woman took it.

‘Thank you,’ he said.

She was a plain, plump woman in her middle forties, long thick hair drawn back and held with an elastic band. She smiled.