A sudden dip took Jackson, the Saab and the Holy Mother into a denser pocket of fog. It was like flying through a cloud and Jackson almost expected the Saab to buck with turbulence. In the cottonwool heart of the dip he saw a flash of silver and Split the lark came unwonted into his brain, the little men running his memory lazily reaching, in their morning lethargy, for the nearest thing to hand. Bulb after Bulb, in Silver rolled. The argent blaze heralded a new kind of hazard – a woman. A woman who suddenly hurtled out from the trees at the side of the road.

For a split second Jackson thought she was a deer – a mile or two back there’d been a barely visible road sign displaying a stag that looked as if it was running for its life. The woman looked that way too. No bears and wolves any more, the only predators women ran from nowadays were men. She wasn’t alone, she was dragging a child by the hand, a small one, wearing a red duffel coat. The coat was a dark flare in the fog.

Jackson absorbed all of this in the nanosecond between spotting the woman and child and slamming on the brakes in an effort to avoid making roadkill out of the pair of them. The dog, startled awake by the Saab’s emergency stop, remained safely lodged in the footwell of the car and gave him an unreadable look. ‘Sorry,’ Jackson said.

When he got out of the car he found the woman down on all fours like a cat, gasping for breath. Jackson was sure the Saab hadn’t come into contact with her. And she was a big woman, maybe not as much of a buffer as a deer but he would have noticed the dunt, surely? ‘Did I hit you?’ he puzzled. She shook her head and, sitting back on her heels, managed to wheeze, ‘I’m out of breath, that’s all.’ She nodded in the direction of the child standing impassively by, and said, ‘I was carrying her. She’s heavier than she looks. Good brakes,’ she added, glancing at the Saab, inches away from her.

‘Good driver,’ Jackson said.

The child’s red duffel coat was open, revealing a gauzy pink dressing-up costume beneath. A fairy, an angel, a princess, they were all pretty much cut from the same cloth as far as Jackson was concerned. It was an area of retail Marlee had familiarized him with, somewhat against his will. A battered star-topped silver wand indicated ‘fairy’. Was this the flash of silver he had seen in the fog? The girl was clutching the wand, two-handed like a battleaxe, as if her life depended on it. Jackson wouldn’t have liked to be the one who tried to wrestle it off her, she might be small but she was a punchy-looking kid.

The rest of her ensemble was also the worse for wear. There was a rip in the skirt and bits of twig and leaf were caught in the cheap fabric. It reminded Jackson of a production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that Julia had taken him to see. The fairies in the play had been filthy, mud-stained creatures who looked as though they had crawled out of a bog. At fourteen, Julia had played Puck in a school production of the play. At the same age, his own daughter had aspirations to be a vampire. ‘It’s a phase,’ Josie said. ‘Well, I should hope so,’ Jackson said.

He helped the woman struggle to her feet. She was wearing a tracksuit that only served to emphasize how broad in the beam she was, built like a collier, Jackson thought. She had a big, practical handbag strapped across her front.

Jackson wondered if she shouldn’t be even a little wary of the fact that she was stepping into the vehicle of a complete stranger in the middle of nowhere and, for all she knew, was walking into a worse nightmare than the one she had left behind. Who was to say that the Saab driver wasn’t a murderous psycho, combing the countryside for prey?

‘I used to be a policeman,’ he said, for reassurance. Although, of course, that was exactly what you would say if you were hoping to trick someone into getting into a car with you. (Perhaps it was himself he was trying to reassure, perhaps it was the woman who was a psycho.)

‘Yeah, me too,’ she muttered and laughed a grim kind of laugh.

‘Really?’ he said but she ignored him. ‘Is someone after you?’ he asked. The woman and the child both turned instinctively to look towards the wood. Jackson tried to imagine something flying out from trees that he didn’t feel up to dealing with and, short of an armoured tank (or a small wand-wielding girl), came up a blank. Instead of answering the question the woman said, ‘We need a lift.’

Jackson, also not one to waste words, said, ‘You’d better get in the car then.’

He adjusted the mirror to try to look at the woman in the back seat. He couldn’t see her face, however, as she had twisted herself round awkwardly in order to keep watch out of the rear window of the car. It wasn’t worth the effort. If anyone was behind them there would be little chance of spotting them in this fog. Or vice versa. He adjusted the mirror so that he could inspect the small girl sitting next to the woman. The girl raised her eyebrows at him, an inscrutable gesture.

Eventually, the woman turned round to face the windscreen and stared straight ahead. She had bruises blooming on her face and dried blood on her hands.

‘Are you hurt?’ he asked.

‘No.’

‘You’ve got blood on you.’

‘It’s not mine.’

‘That’s all right then,’ Jackson said drily. Both his new passengers had the same slightly stunned look that he had seen many times on survivors. They looked like refugees from a disaster – a fire or an earthquake – people who had abandoned their home in the clothes they stood up in. Domestic abuse, he supposed. War on the home front – what else would a woman and child be running from?

Minutes passed before the woman said to him, ‘My car broke down,’ as if that explained the state of the pair of them. Sighing wearily, she added, more to herself than to him, ‘It’s been a long day.’

‘It’s only half seven in the morning,’ Jackson puzzled.

‘Exactly.’

When he glanced in the mirror again he saw that the woman had strapped the child in. The seat-belt was much too big and looked as if it might strangle her if he braked too quickly. It was a long time since he’d had a child-seat in a car. If he ever drove Nathan he had to borrow one from Julia, something which annoyed her out of all proportion, in Jackson’s opinion anyway.

Although he might not have admitted it, he felt slightly unsettled – the fog, the woods, the Midwich Cuckoos kid, not to mention the sense of fear the woman had brought into the car with her – it was all more like an episode of The Twilight Zone than a comedy by Shakespeare.

She didn’t seem to care where they were heading, anywhere except where she had been seemed to be a good direction. Jackson was no longer sure it mattered which way you went, you never ended up where you expected. Every day a surprise, you caught the wrong train, the right bus. A girl opens a box and gets more than she bargained for.

‘Don’t you want to know where I’m going?’ he asked after what seemed like an eternity of silence.

‘Not particularly,’ she said.

‘Magical mystery tour then,’ Jackson said cheerfully.

‘I can’t help but worry about you, son. I’m your mother, it’s my job to worry.’

‘I know, Mum, and don’t get me wrong, I love you for it, but I’m OK, I really am.’

‘Oh, all right, on you go then, but just remember, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.’ (They kiss.) ‘Bye, bye then, love. See you on Friday, and then we’ll—’

‘The line,Tilly, is actually “All work and no play makes Vince a dull boy.”’

‘Really?’

‘I think it’s supposed to be amusing in some way.’

‘Amusing? Is it?’ Tilly puzzled.

‘Blame the writer, darling, not me. We’re playing to a low common denominator here.’

Never underestimate the intelligence of an audience. That was what Douglas used to say and, as in so many things, he was right, of course.