She immediately began trying to rationalise and deconstruct it, knowing from experience that finding sources for this sudden onset of fear would help it to dissipate. The first, albeit the least specific, explanation was simply recurrence. Since Mum had died, she had been prone to these sudden feelings of the floor having dropped from under her, accompanied by an acute, vertiginous insecurity deriving from having nobody left to turn to. Once in a while, some part of her remembered that she was all alone, that the person she had always been able to rely upon in times of anxiety, of trouble, of precisely this kind of scared vulnerability, was no longer there. It was as though the sense of devastation had been so large that her mind would only admit a little of it at a time. One of the things it had deferred was the fear, but the valve was loose from pressure, and every so often there was a leak that left her feeling this way.

On this occasion, it was more than mere insecurity. She was rattled by a profound fear that something had happened to Jim. It was absurd, she knew: totally unsubstantiated. In fact, it was probably just what her greater fear had latched on to: with Mum gone, he was the person she could least do without. The fact that he wasn’t in yet this morning had sparked off a paranoid dread of losing him too.

He was usually here by this time, which must have piqued her sense of something being askew. Jasmine had keys to the office, but she had never had to open the place first thing in the morning. Jim was always there before her, even though he lived on the other side of the river. He usually closed the place too, returning to write up all the paperwork no matter how late or how far the field work had stretched. Perhaps there was heavy traffic; there was work starting at the Kingston Bridge to do with the M74 extension, so maybe that had led to increased volume through the tunnel, which was Jim’s preferred route across the river from Hyndland.

No, that was it, she thought. Not traffic: Jim’s flat. He wasn’t coming into the office this morning because he was waiting in to film the not-so-disabled Robert Croft showing up with all his gear in expectation of carrying out a plastering job.