After the Mahler, there was the one o’clock news, including a small item on Major Mike Dreyfuss and the American reaction to the shuttle disaster. Predictable stuff. He had watched the TV pictures. Orange flame, the nose of the craft crumpling, turning in on itself, more explosions. It was a funny thing about Dreyfuss, though. He was in his late thirties, a few years older than Hepton, not exactly his physical prime. Hepton had read about the other candidates who’d been in the running for the UK’s only place on the mission. They’d been young, strong. So why Dreyfuss? Not that it was any big deal. Not the big deal it was when the first Briton in space had gone up on that Soviet mission, or when the second one had gone up soon afterwards, courtesy of the Americans. No, to be Britain’s third man in space: well, there was something pathetic about that, wasn’t there? He allowed himself a guilty smile.

The Alfred de Lyon Hospital was, for the most part, a rest home, and had been chosen not because it was so far away from the base but, in Fagin’s words, ‘because Paul is suffering from some kind of nervous exhaustion, and they specialise in that’. Now that Hepton re-ran that statement in his head, he saw an ominous ambiguity to it. He checked in his mirror but couldn’t see the Sierra. He signalled and came to a halt by the side of the road, where he waited for three minutes. But there was still no sign of the car. Somehow, he felt disappointed. Maybe he should double back. The woman might be in trouble, her car might have gone off the road …

Or, more likely, she had taken a turning and was heading towards her destination.

Maybe Nick was right, Hepton said to himself. Maybe I do need to book myself into this place. He started the car again, and within quarter of an hour was turning the Renault through an imposing main gateway and up a country house driveway of gravel so clean it might have been polished that very morning. Therapy for the patients, perhaps?

As he rounded a bend, a rabbit leapt into his path and he nearly hit it. He braked hard and watched it flee across an expanse of manicured lawn and into some shrubbery. Skin tingling, he opened the car door and stepped out. He could hear a car approaching the gateway. When he turned, he saw the same Ford Sierra driving past. He listened as its engine faded into the distance. Smiling, he got back into the Renault and drove up to the imposing entrance of the Alfred de Lyon Hospital itself.

‘I must have made a mistake then, it’s as simple as that.’