They had made love that night, unsuccessfully. ‘He’s not much good in the bedroom department!’ A letter he could write, and questions he could ask. He could handle a complicated conversation with a ticket salesman, and he could disguise whisky so it looked like juice – and he could provide sweets for schoolboys he’d never ever see again, and make them happy. Relaxing into sexual intercourse, though – that was something he had never ever been able to do, and he sat on the bench pondering the fact, returning to it, turning it over and over as the trains came and went.

It all came back to sex. So what?

He would not jump onto the tracks now, for that would waste the ticket. Better that he simply went to Preston, on the 16.48 – for the train appeared to be absolutely on time and why should his chopped body delay it? The next one had been cancelled, he noticed, and the train company was genuinely sorry. The apologies were available at the touch of a button, and they’d found an actor who sounded so sincere: ‘We’re sorry for the delay… We’re sorry to announce, and we’re sorry – so sorry, in fact, that we are holding back the tears, feeling only shame. Don’t tell on us, please! We’re sorry…’

Michael laughed.

His own train would take him north, and he could decide about the onward route when he got to Preston. He would go right back up to the Highlands, because he was remembering the perfect, isolated station two hours or more beyond Glasgow, and express trains definitely came through it. The track was unfenced for miles, and there was a night train from Aberdeen or Inverness – the poor driver would see him in the headlamp, of course, but that couldn’t be helped. Michael would be illuminated, as if by a searchlight. He could turn away, though – in fact, he could walk backwards once he’d heard it coming, or he could put his head down and run, and the man at the controls would blast the horn and never see his face.

13

Michael sat back and sucked a mint.

Poor Morris had made it up the line towards Worcester, but Michael had never met him, and therefore didn’t know that there was a new plan. It seemed that Tony really had gone to the wrong café, somehow, and refused point-blank to drive all the way back to Cheltenham. The idea now was obvious: to sort someone in Birmingham.

‘I don’t have any money,’ said Morris.

‘I know that,’ said Keenan. ‘Go to Birmingham. Can you get through the barrier?’

‘I don’t know. Maybe, maybe not.’

‘If you get through, I can fix you up with Aziz. That’s the best I can do, because—’

‘Fix me up with who?’

‘What?’

‘Who have you got in Birmingham?’

‘It’s a guy called Aziz – I thought you’d met him.’