‘I don’t mean conscious, specific fear, I mean subconscious and strictly non-specific. Something you feel, not something you think: a peremptory feeling that tells you urgently and unequivocally that you are in danger. You never get that? A sudden, unarticulated sense that something about your immediate environment is disturbingly wrong?’

Like having a killer sitting in her kitchen, Jasmine thought but didn’t say. Instead she cast her mind back to the start of all this, and that precipitous assault by a feeling of unease.

‘Yes. Monday morning, when I went into the office. I knew something was wrong but I didn’t know how I knew.’

‘That was fear talking. Conscious thought occupies only a small proportion of the brain: most of it is taken up with processing input from the senses, input you are not aware of processing. Most of our conscious thought is rooted in language, which evolved fairly late in the day and is like a flashy but clumsily written piece of software compared to the rest of the operating system, which ticks away silently and makes sense of the information it’s getting much, much faster. The part of your brain that tells you to run because your early-warning system detected a predator or an avalanche was there a lot longer than language and responds a lot more immediately.’

She remembered assessing her surroundings in Jim’s office, the tiny clues that she had looked for after the fact in order to explain what her subconscious mind had deduced in a flash.

‘So what information told your brain we were about to get shot?’ she demanded.

‘I’m not sure. Car not slowing down as it reached a dead end; maybe something else about the way it approached; a glimpse of what could have been a gun but which my mind ignored until it combined with other information: I don’t know. I could try to retro-analyse, but that’s the whole point: it wasn’t a response to rational analysis, it was a response to something in the brain that we tend to ignore because of rational analysis.’

‘You sound like this is something you’ve thought about a lot.’

‘Comes with the territory. We don’t listen to fear properly. We feel it, but we try to explain it away, because we relate it to our conscious thought, render it in language. Most of the time, when we rationalise it, we’re looking for reassurance, for reasons why that feeling was a false alarm. We’re looking for reasons why it’s going to be okay. For a great many people, I’ve been the reason it isn’t going to be okay. Listening to my fear is the reason I’ve lived this long.’