When I got to my flat the door was locked. I tried to get in but the chain was across the door. I shouted and banged. At last the letter-box flipped open and a note slid out. It said GO AWAY. I found a pen and wrote on the backside. IT’S MY FLAT. As I feared there was no response. For the second time that day I ended up at Louise’s.

‘We’re going to sleep in a different bed tonight,’ she said as she filled the bathroom with clouds of steam and incense oils. ‘I’m going to warm the room and you’re going to lie in the tub and drink this cocoa. All right Christopher Robin?’

Yes, with or without a blue hood. How tender this is and how unlikely. I don’t believe any of it. Jacqueline must have known I’d have to come here. Why would she do that? They’re not in it together are they, to punish me? Perhaps I’ve died and this is Judgement Day. Judgement or not I can’t go back to Jacqueline. Whatever happens here, and I held out no great hopes, I knew that I’d split myself from her in ways that were too profound to heal. In the park in the rain I had recognised one thing at least; that Louise was the woman I wanted even if I couldn’t have her. Jacqueline I had to admit had never been wanted, simply she had had roughly the right shape to fit for a while.

Molecular docking is a serious challenge for bio-chemists. There are many ways to fit molecules together but only a few juxtapositions that bring them close enough to bond. On a molecular level success may mean discovering what synthetic structure, what chemical, will form a union with, say, the protein shape on a tumour cell. If you make this high-risk jigsaw work you may have found a cure for carcinoma. But molecules and the human beings they are a part of exist in a universe of possibility. We touch one another, bond and break, drift away on force-fields we don’t understand. Docking here inside Louise may heal a damaged heart, on the other hand it may be an expensively ruinous experiment.

I put on the rough towelling robe Louise had left for me. I hoped it wasn’t Elgin’s. There used to be a scam in the undertaking trade whereby any man sent to the Chapel of Rest in a good suit of clothes had the lot tried on by the embalmer and his boys while he, the deceased, was made ready for the grave. Whoever the clothes best fitted put a shilling on them; that is, the shilling went in the Poor Box and the clothes went off the dead man’s back. Obviously he was allowed to wear them while ritual viewing took place but as soon as it was time for the lid to be screwed down, one of the lads whipped them off and covered the unfortunate in a cheap winding sheet. If I was going to stab Elgin in the back I didn’t want to do it in his dressing gown.