His eyes met a pair of legs. They were hanging a couple of feet above the ground, and on the floor lay an overturned stool. Hepton’s eyes started to move upwards, his teeth gritted in growing horror. The body’s arms hung limply; the head lolled at a tight angle. A thin metal tube, almost certainly carrying electrical wires for the building’s lighting, ran the breadth of the large cupboard’s ceiling, and this was what the green garden twine had been tied to.

The green garden twine that was cutting into Paul Vincent’s neck.

His face was purple, eyes and tongue bulging obscenely. Somewhere behind Hepton the receptionist shrieked. He leapt forward and wrapped his arms around Vincent’s legs, lifting them a little higher, then reached up with a finger to pull the twine out from where it had cut into the neck.

‘Get me scissors!’ he hissed. ‘Or a knife – anything that’ll cut this.’

The woman had a small pair of nail scissors in her pocket and handed these to him. After that initial shriek, she had quickly calmed. Hepton supposed she had seen this sort of thing before, working here. He cut the twine and eased Paul Vincent’s body down, bringing it out into the hall and laying it on the carpeted floor.

‘I didn’t know,’ the woman was saying. ‘I never realised the poor man might—’

‘He wouldn’t!’ Hepton snapped back at her. ‘He wouldn’t do this.’

He looked past the receptionist, along to the end of the corridor, and saw Harry standing there. Their eyes met, then she turned swiftly and was gone, back towards the emergency stairs.

‘Wait!’ he shouted.

The receptionist saw him staring and glanced back along the corridor too, but saw nothing. No doubt she thought him emotional and in shock.

Hepton stared at Paul Vincent, then at where Harry had been standing. He made his decision and bent over his friend, pushing Paul’s swollen tongue out of the way and sticking two fingers into the young man’s mouth, searching down towards the throat, checking if there was a clear flow for air. Then he pinched Paul’s nose and gave mouth-to-mouth resuscitation.

‘Come on, Paul,’ he said. He pushed down with both hands on Vincent’s chest, once, twice, three times. Pause. Once, twice, three times again. He checked for a pulse. There wasn’t one – but then there was! Faint, but there.

‘Is he …?’

Hepton turned to the woman. ‘Go get a doctor,’ he hissed.

‘Yes, of course.’ She hurried away.

Hepton kept trying the mishmash of life-saving techniques, remembering bits of each of them from the training sessions he had attended more than a year ago. He pushed down hard again on Vincent’s chest with the heels of his hands. There was a palpable groan from the inert body. He crawled back to Vincent’s head, his mouth close to the deep-red ear.