This Jackson bloke had come searching for the truth about Carol Braithwaite, hadn’t he? Linda,Tracy, Barry. Bit players, walk-on extras in the drama of Carol Braithwaite’s death. Maybe it was time the main players stepped up to the stage. End of days now. Barry was going down in flames, he might as well take a few more down with him.

What he would really have liked to do right now was to lie down on the bed and have a snooze but he heaved himself up and drank down another miniature vodka. Then he filled up the two small bottles with water and replaced them in the minibar.

He couldn’t go on. He didn’t have it in him. The reckoning was coming. For Barry. For everyone.

‘Thanks, love,’ he said, returning the plastic room key. ‘Tie me kangaroo down, sport, eh?’

The dog sat by his side as they both stared at the retreating Saab. ‘I don’t believe it,’ Jackson said. He felt as if he had lost an old faithful friend. ‘I liked that car,’ he said.

The car started to slow down and Jackson said, ‘Come on, she must have changed her mind,’ and sprinted after it. The Saab stopped long enough for his phone to be thrown on to the verge before moving off again, Jackson and the dog in pursuit. The car goaded him by stopping once more and ejecting Jackson’s rucksack. He ran after it again and just before he reached the Saab it set off again. He retrieved his phone and his bag and waited to see if anything else was going to be bailed out of the car but this time the Saab accelerated away. ‘The fairer sex,’ Jackson said to the dog. (‘Fairer in what way exactly?’ he had once asked Julia. ‘In love and war,’ she said.)

In the rear window of the car Jackson could see the silver wand moving from side to side, like a metronome. The kid’s farewell.

They were in the middle of nowhere. Phone a friend? Did he have any? Julia perhaps. Not much she could do. Ask the audience? He turned to the dog. A dumb creature. He found the packet of dog treats in his pocket, all he had salvaged from his shop at the garage. They were little biscuits in the shape of tiny bones. They looked surprisingly appetizing but he resisted and tossed one to the dog.

A taxi firm seemed like a sensible option but the phone, although it seemed to have survived its ousting, showed there was no signal up here. Nothing for it but to set off and walk. The dog, naturally, was happier with this plan than Jackson.

They hoofed it for a good half-hour before they encountered any sign of civilization. The dog heard the approaching car before Jackson did. Jackson caught hold of its collar and towed it over to the verge where they waited for the vehicle to appear out of the fog. Memories of the Land Cruiser made Jackson consider throwing himself in the nearest ditch but there was no ditch and he could see now that it wasn’t the Land Cruiser that was advancing towards them along the deserted road, it was an Avensis, a grey one.

Jackson put out his hand to flag it down. ‘Stand and deliver,’ he murmured to the dog.

The Avensis stopped and the nearside window rolled down. ‘Hello there, fancy seeing you here,’ the driver said.

Jackson peered at his face, regretting again not having bought those spectacles. Did he know him?

The Avensis driver opened the passenger door and said, ‘There’s a hell in hello, isn’t that what they say? Give you a lift, squire?’

It was the room-service waiter who had left the tracking device. Jackson looked to the dog for confirmation but the dog had already hopped niftily into its now customary position in the footwell.

Reluctantly, Jackson climbed in after it.

A small pink furry rabbit hung droopily from the rear-view mirror. If it came to a contest between dreck car accessories Jackson was confident that his own little mascot, the light-up Virgin Mary wobbling on the dashboard, attached by a sucker and bearing an AA battery in her holy insides, would win hands down against a pink furry rabbit.

‘Whitby, is it, guv?’ the Avensis driver said, tipping an imaginary chauffeur’s hat.

‘Please.’ Well, this took weird to a new level.

‘Nice mutt,’ the Avensis driver said.

‘Yeah,’ Jackson said. ‘I think you said that last night when you put a tracking device on him. Why do you want to follow me?’

‘Maybe I’m following the dog.’ He restarted the Avensis’s engine and said, ‘Right, squire, here we go. First we take Manhattan, eh?’

‘Who are you?’

‘Straight in there with the difficult questions. Who am I?’ his new friend repeated thoughtfully. ‘Who am I? Of course, you might ask – who are any of us?’

‘It wasn’t really a philosophical question,’ Jackson said.

‘Name, rank and number?’

‘Just a name would do.’ Close up Jackson could see that the man looked slightly moth-eaten. He had the ashen skin of a smoker and on cue he retrieved a packet of cigarettes from the glove compartment. ‘Want one?’

‘No thanks.’ Just accept you’ve entered into an alternative reality, Jackson counselled himself. It probably happened round about the time he reached Leeds. ‘Is this something to do with Linda Pallister?’ he hazarded.

‘Who?’

‘Or Hope McMaster?’

‘Ah, Hope springs eternal in the human breast: / Man never is, but always to be blest. Pope. Wrote some good stuff. Know him?’

‘Not personally,’ Jackson said.

‘What you doing all the way out here then?’

‘Well . . .’ Jackson said, defeated by the complexity of the story before he even started it. He settled for the simple version. ‘Someone stole my car.’

The fog had finally begun to lift, streaks of pale gold gleaming through the thinning wisps.

‘Looks like it’s going to be a nice day,’ the Avensis driver said.

‘First to see the sea,’ was always the call when they went to the seaside. Jackson, Josie and Marlee. It seemed a long time ago now that they had been a tight little family threesome. The winner (always Marlee even if she had to have the sea pointed out to her) merited three chocolate buttons. Josie rationed sweets as if there was a war on.

And no sign of the sea at all today, the coast still entombed in fog. A ‘sea fret’, they said in Yorkshire. In Scotland, the far, far north, Ultima Thule, Louise would have said ‘haar’. They were separated by a common language and an invisible border crossing. Did she ever think about him?

By the time they crested a final hill the fog had begun to roll back and Whitby started to reveal itself in all its dramatically Gothic glory – the abbey, the harbour, West Cliff, the higgledy-piggledy fishermen’s houses.

‘You can see why Count Dracula landed here, can’t you?’ the driver of the Avensis said.

‘Dracula isn’t real,’ Jackson pointed out. ‘He’s a fictional character.’

The driver shrugged and said, ‘Fact, fiction, what’s the difference?’

‘Well . . .’ Jackson said. But before he could embark on a convincing proof (such as Do you want to feel the difference between a fictional punch and a real one?) they began their descent into town and the Avensis driver said, ‘Drop you at the police station, shall I?’

‘The police station?’

‘Report the theft of your motor.’

‘Yeah, of course, good idea,’ Jackson said. So strange had been the advent of the Avensis that it had managed to push the whole escapade with the woman and child to the back of his mind. It felt like he was in an episode of The Prisoner, any moment a giant ball of bubblegum would come bouncing along the road and swallow him up and demonstrate that there was indeed only a thin line separating fact and fiction.

They had slowed to a crawl, the Avensis driver peering around, a stranger in town.

‘Do you know where the police station is?’ Jackson asked.

The Avensis driver tapped the SatNav on his dashboard. ‘No, but she does.’ Jackson felt a possessive pang. In his mind Jane was a one man woman.