Roy’s phone rang long enough to make me hold my breath. When he spoke at last, it wasn’t what I hoped to hear. “It’s Roy. Don’t know who you are or what you want, so say. Your number would be good as well.”

“It’s me. It’s your father. I take it you missed the train. Just let me know where I need to pick you up.”

I was hoping he would interrupt my message, but his phone stayed mute. I rang off to await his call. Down in the station the windows of the darkened train resembled slabs of slate. I peered across the bay until I fancied I was making out the dormant windmills, which looked as if the night had clogged the works of the world. Everything felt silenced, not least Roy. How long ought I to wait before calling him again? I assumed he was in a tunnel or somewhere else that cut off his signal, though not on a train or indeed a bus, since those had stopped running as well. When I tired of waiting I set about hunting for him. He wasn’t in the station; whoever was sitting in an unlit corner wasn’t him. He wasn’t in the nearest carriage of the train, though the solitary passenger was unidentifiable in the dark. There was one in every carriage I walked through, though surely not the same occupant every time. Now I was at the front of the train, where the seated figure resembled a propped-up section of a painting if not a sourceless shadow. Despite the absence of a driver, the train was crawling forwards. I swung around to shout Roy’s name through the carriages, and a voice too soft for its gender to be plain spoke at my back. “He’ll be with me.”

This jerked me awake, or the muted thud of the front door did. Somebody was trying not to make much noise in entering the house. I heard a surreptitious creak of stairs and then a key searching for the lock. I was in my hall by the time Roy let himself in, edging the door open so gradually that I had time to check my watch. It was nearly two o’clock, and he blinked unfavourably at me as if I’d wakened him, except not quite. “How did you get home?” I said.

“Lift.”

“From whom?”

Even more reluctantly he muttered “Friend.”

Several of those had driven over from Manchester to spend whatever kind of evening they’d spent with him. “I hope the driver wasn’t in your state,” I said.

“Can I go to bed now?”

“I think you better had, and we’ll talk in the morning.”