He turned to look at the car and saw the nose of the black Sierra as it started to speed towards him. Harry, clearly visible behind the windscreen, seemed to be enjoying the look of terror on his face. She gunned the vehicle forwards just as Hepton turned and ran.

He was no judge of distance but reckoned that he couldn’t make the end of the lane before the car caught him. He quickly sought an open door to one of the workshops, some garage that hadn’t been locked up. But it was useless. The Sierra was only a few yards from him when he made up his mind. He braced himself against the metal door of one of the garages, then pushed off from it and sprinted across the line of the oncoming vehicle. Harry accelerated harder yet, but Hepton had judged it right, and he leapt at the high wall of one of the gardens, his fingers seeking the top edge of the brickwork. They found it, and he pulled himself upwards as the Sierra curved towards him, its front wing searing against the wall. He swung his legs upwards so that the roof of the car just missed them, and hung there, teeth gritted, thinking suddenly and absurdly of the multigym’s chinning bar.

The Sierra screeched to a stop at the end of the lane, just as Hepton was about to drop back to the ground. Then its wheels spun and it started to reverse hard towards him. Christ, he couldn’t hang on much longer, and he hadn’t the strength to pull himself over the wall. But then the car stopped, idled for a moment.

‘What’s going on?’

Hepton turned his head and saw that a man had appeared from a gate in one of the garden fences. He was in his shirtsleeves and carried a folded newspaper, obviously having just been disturbed from an evening’s reading in his garden. Hepton dropped to the ground and watched the Sierra start forwards slowly, turning out of the lane and speeding away.

Of course: there couldn’t be any witnesses, could there? It had to look like an accident. Hepton saw it all clearly. The note from Nick was a fake. She had chosen the pub because she’d known he had to walk along this lane to get to it. And in the lane there would be no escape, and no one to see the car hit him. But it wouldn’t have been hit-and-run. That might have looked too suspicious. No, she would have stopped and played the innocent. She would say he had jumped in front of the car, perhaps, and everyone would come to believe her, because it would be shown that Hepton was distraught, unstable after watching his friend die earlier in the day.

Just another suicide.

‘I said, what’s going on?’

Hepton snapped out of his reverie, went to the man and shook his hand.