Was it really so implausible? She had not recognised him from the train – that was to be expected, but he still couldn’t believe she hadn’t noticed him on the bus, because he’d climbed on board after her and passed her in the aisle. They were the only two passengers to alight at a remote moorland spot in the pitch dark – but she simply hadn’t been aware of him. Her priority must have been working out where the hotel was, of course, and he had followed at a distance – not because he had sinister designs, but because he’d been so uncertain as to where he was going.

That was the truth.

Now, however, he had set himself up as a protector – or as someone with knowledge and experience. He should be dead, but he wasn’t. Crewe station would have got back to normal by now, and he should be where? In a mortuary, of course. The shoe that was on his foot should be in a plastic bag, the details from the debit card logged into a computer. He should be a police officer’s routine nuisance, but instead he was holding a glass and the deep red of the wine made him think of all the blood that was still circulating in his veins, unspilled.

He could put the glass down on the table.

He could pick it up again and taste the wine.

By saying so little to Maria, and nodding his head, he had been promoted to someone not just safe but useful… essential, even. For whatever the weather threw at them, he would have to guide her over the moors to some place he’d never heard of called Higher Lee Ridge: he would have to follow the dots and the dashes. He had been there before, apparently – but a long time ago. He could hear his own voice as the wind buffeted them both, and they stared at the sodden map.

‘I’m sure we’re close,’ he could say. ‘I recognise that stile, that… sheep.’

He hadn’t suggested he knew the way intimately, so they could navigate together and he would simply give her the reassurance that if they did miss their way, they would do so together. The problem, of course, was that this was a wilderness, and it was bound to rain.

It was bound to rain, and he had absolutely no equipment.

23

Perhaps there was a God after all.