‘How was your mother?’ she says, the silk of her dressing gown sliding across the polished surface of her thigh as she turns to look at him from her place on the sofa.

‘Oh you know, annoying.’

She’s not listening. She says, ‘That man just came round again, the one who was on the driveway before.’

‘Did you speak to him?’

‘Of course not! I didn’t even open the door. He was quite persistent though.’ She swivels her neck and shoots him a narrow-eyed stare. ‘You’re not in any trouble are you, darling?’

Cullen wonders if he can get away with ignoring Veronica’s ban on hard drink while ‘they’ try to get pregnant and decides against it. He helps himself to a bottle of wine lying opened on the coffee table. ‘No. It’s just a…’ Cullen roots around in his mind ‘…new broadband service. He doesn’t seem to want to take no for an answer.’

‘OK,’ she says, unfurling her long legs, the soft blonde down on her upper thigh just visible in the lamplight.

He takes another gulp of the wine then sniffs it. ‘What the hell is this?’

‘That clever non-alcoholic stuff,’ Veronica says. ‘We don’t want to put the troops off, do we?’

Afterwards Cullen drifts off to sleep and dreams about being alone on the bridge. He wakes with his heart ticking and his mind first on Satnam then remembering a conversation with Ratner not long ago when Mark admitted to sneaking out for early morning trysts under the guise of marathon training while his wife was fast asleep. Cullen doesn’t trust the bastard one bit. The sly look on his face when Cullen asked him to be more discreet. He thinks about how the fucker lied to him. It takes a bold man to do that to another man’s face when they both know that’s what he’s doing. Cullen wishes he’d read him the riot act when they last spoke. Why was he so moderate, so polite? What a dickhead I’ve been, he thinks. A man like Ratner needs dealing with.

Beside him Veronica sleeps on. He edges out of bed, careful not to disturb his wife lest she demand another tour of duty, grabs yesterday’s clothes from the chair and slips out of the room. By 4.30 he’s in the Volvo.

In a moment of inattention, he narrowly avoids zooming through a red light then finds himself speeding across a junction without looking, a truck driver angrily sounding his horn as he jams on the air brakes. Something dark and dormant is awakening in him. The old death wish blinking itself out of hibernation, he thinks, the seed of self-destruction pushing out a thin white shoot. For the remainder of the journey he does his best to focus his energies on driving.