It hadn’t changed. Weeds were growing through the cracks in the concrete, litter had accumulated on the sharp grey stones that lay between the tracks and there was some half-hearted graffiti behind the bumpers. Once, Daisy had asked Will to meet her here after work; she’d asked in a way that he couldn’t refuse. When she’d stepped off the train, her face had been flushed, her blouse crumpled, dark stains under the arms. Together they’d walked down to the seafront and he’d bought ice creams and they’d sat for a while on the wall and watched the sea come in. Daisy had talked and Will had tried to be interested but he wasn’t. He didn’t care about the pricing of sunscreen, he didn’t care about two-for-one offers, or that some elderly woman with a cut had bled all over the staff room; the thought of it made him feel sick.

‘This has been so nice,’ Daisy said, when it was time for them to go home. ‘Let’s do this again tomorrow!’

She had taken hold of his hand. Hers was warm and damp.

‘You will come and meet me, won’t you, Will?’

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘sure.’

‘You’ll be waiting on the platform like you were today?’

‘Yep.’

‘Promise?’ Daisy had asked, wheedling. Wheedling didn’t suit her. She was big, broad-shouldered; good-looking but not in a feminine way. ‘Promise me? Pretty please?’

‘I said so, didn’t I?’ Will replied tersely.

The promise had been worthless. He hadn’t gone back to the station the next day. That was the day he watched Alice hanging up her swimming things from his viewpoint behind the hedge and he forgot about Daisy altogether, as if she’d never existed.

Daisy. How long had she waited here, at the station before she realised that Will wasn’t going to turn up? If he concentrated hard enough, would he be able to see her, twenty-four-and-a-half years earlier, checking her watch and the station clock, wondering where he was?

Will Jones took his phone out of his back pocket and made a video sketch of the station, zooming in on the great, metal bumpers at the end of the track, designed to stop trains making contact with the wall. It had become habit to make little videos during the course of his research, to publish on social media when his latest book was released. Normally he enjoyed it but today it was nothing more than a displacement activity.