There was only one TV and video store in Bootle, but it was on the main street with a big window onto the sidewalk. Seven TVs were going in that window and three of them had the same thing on the screen. The old Indian staring at those screens as if they were holding him there by force cut a strange figure to the passers-by who altered their routes instinctively to get round him. He was wearing an odd assortment of clothes – a good pair of leather Timberland boots with yellow-and-red laces, a woollen checked jacket that looked new, and a pair of beige corduroy trousers with a crease down the fronts that would be at home at the bar of a smart golf club. And yet the man had the air of a drifter about him, a shiftless, haunted look that flits over the faces of countless street people, or refugees being driven in trucks like animals. It was the air of the displaced. The pedestrians avoiding him may have thought simply, on account of his old unwashed Indian face, that this was a bum, but if it was, it was an expensively-dressed one.

Calvin Bitterhand was distraught. Silver had ignited. The man on the three screens was telling how the town was in the shadow of some terrible murder. Calvin could read the words easily on his lips though there was no sound here in the street. In fact, he could read them even when his face was turned away from the camera. The TV man standing in the snow looked pretty pleased about the whole thing for someone who kept saying the word terrible. It was too late. He wasn’t going to make it in time. He slumped forward and let his forehead touch the glass as he watched. The pictures were back inside now, of a woman with a stupid face like a painted doll, sitting at a desk with a box floating up above her left shoulder that said SKI TOWN HORROR.