Tracy didn’t break stride, just punched the Land Cruiser bloke hard in the face and steamed on towards the kid. She caught sight of the other hulking leather-jacket – no surprise there – weaving his way through the throng towards her. Wolves everywhere, closing in. This one was expecting her to dodge out of his reach but instead Taurean Tracy charged straight at him and rammed the hulk out of the way.

The crowd shrank back from her, nothing like a mad cow on the rampage to clear a space. Courtney spotted Tracy and let go of the old woman’s hand and ran towards her. Tracy snatched her up and clutched her tightly in her arms. Save the kid, save the world. Kid was the world. The world, the whole world and nothing but the world. ‘Can’t breathe,’ Courtney murmured.

‘Sorry,’ Tracy said, loosening her grip, looking round for the escalator. No way out, too many people. And here was bloody Len Lomax again, what was wrong with the stupid old bastard? He was spitting mad, he never did like to be thwarted, especially by a woman. ‘I want to fucking talk to you, OK?’ he said.

He darted forward and tried to seize the kid, started pulling her away from Tracy. Courtney, clamped on to Tracy like a baby koala, screamed her head off and started bashing him with her wand. Like hitting an elephant with a stalk of grass.

The old woman, wig askew, made a sudden, unexpected lunge at Lomax, more like falling than lunging, and grasped him round the waist. Lomax twisted round so that he was face to face in the old woman’s embrace and for a second they looked like a pair of grappling pensioners at a particularly fraught tea-dance.

The old woman had sent Len Lomax off balance and the two of them wobbled perilously as he tried to regain equilibrium. There was another, more urgent platform announcement about the through train and a rush of air and noise signalling its approach. There was a collective gasp of horror from those members of the crowd who were close enough to the bumbling old waltzers to see the imminent danger in their dance. People started to yell and shout and a couple of blokes leaped forward and tried, and failed, to pull them back.

There was a quantum second of silence, counting for nothing in one dimension and stretching to infinity in another. In the balance between triumph and disaster Tracy sensed the inevitability of the outcome.

Sound returned with a vengeance as the train roared into the station and Tracy watched in disbelief as Len Lomax and the old biddy, still clasped in each other’s arms, both lost their footing and toppled over the edge into the engine’s unforgiving path. Tracy slapped her hand over the kid’s eyes but it was all over in a second. The noise of the train’s shrieking brakes outdid the screams and cries from the people on the platform. It was no longer a through train, it was a stopping one now.

Turning away, Tracy caught a glimpse of the leather-jackets, resuscitated like a pair of cartoon villains, scrambling away up the escalator. The puppet-master was gone, no need for the puppets to hang around.

‘I can’t see,’ Courtney said.

‘Sorry,’ Tracy said, removing her hand from the kid’s eyes.

A pair of railway police were sprinting down the other escalator and into the pandemonium on the platform. Two platforms over, another train was standing patiently. ‘Come on,’Tracy said to the kid. The guard was already blowing the whistle to signal that the doors were about to shut. They stepped on to the train just before its jaws hissed and closed.

They walked to the far end of the train, took their seats sedately, like any passengers. All the kid had left of the wand was the silver star. She put it in the backpack.

Tracy found an old freckled banana nestling next to the Maglite in the bottom of her bag. Kid gave the thumbs-up. Made starfish hands out the window.

For a hallucinogenic moment Tracy thought she saw the Saab driver standing next to Brian Jackson on the platform.

Goodbye to Leeds. Good riddance to bad rubbish, Tracy thought. She was never coming back. She was finished with the past. She was an astronaut who’d travelled too far. No return to earth for Tracy. She wasn’t Tracy any more anyway. She was Imogen Brown. She had seventeen friends on Facebook and cash in the bank. And she had the kid to look after. Sleep, eat, protect. Repeat.

Poor old Tilly with her shaky knees and her dicky hip dancing her last waltz in the arms of a man. A brief encounter on a railway platform. Nothing lasts really. Neither happiness nor despair. Not even life lasts very long. She’d played Laura Jesson once, a pretty dreadful repertory production – the Wolsey in Ipswich, or maybe it was the Theatre Royal in Windsor. It didn’t matter now. At the time she was too young to understand the notion of sacrifice, of what love demanded of a person.

A bad man who wanted to hurt the ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ child. For a second she thought she saw her father in his face.

And then she was rolling, rolling through the air and she thought it will be all right, it’s not far to fall to the tracks, but then the train got in the way. Silly Tilly.

Our little life is rounded with a sleep. She thought her wig might have fallen off. You didn’t want to be undignified at the end. If only it was somebody else’s story and not mine. Coiling down into the cold water, the big silver fish shoaling around her, escorting her, protecting her, as she sank slowly down on to the seabed. Be not afeard. Her bones already coral. Her eyes as blind as pearls. The rest is silence.

A Wounded Deer – leaps highest. Crossing on the glassed-in bridge over the tracks, he saw the whole drama play out. He recognized the bizarre cast of players – Vince Collier’s mother, the woman who had stolen his Saab, the little girl, Tweedledum and Tweedledee – in this strange impromptu performance. The only new actor was the old man who fell beneath the train with Vince Collier’s mother. From up here it looked as if she might have pushed him. What was the title of that Mary Gauthier song? ‘Mercy Now’?

Jackson really didn’t like trains. He really didn’t.

He should go down, take charge, do something, help someone. He scooped up the dog, it was only too easy to imagine it being trampled underfoot in this mêlée, and scooted down the escalator and got stuck in the clamour jamming up the platform. He caught sight of his thieving hitchhiker, little girl in tow. She was getting on to another train, leaving more chaos in her wake. He ran towards them but the train was already leaving the platform. He caught sight of the little girl, waving goodbye to him, making hands like stars, until she was out of sight.

An arresting hand on his shoulder made him jump. Brian Jackson. The false Jackson, as he had begun to think of him. Somehow Jackson – the real Jackson – wasn’t surprised.

‘She’s a slippery fish, that Tracy Waterhouse.’

‘Say again?’ Jackson said, wheels spinning in his brain. ‘That was Tracy Waterhouse?’

‘Call yourself a detective.’

‘I don’t understand,’ Jackson said. He didn’t know why he didn’t just get that sentence tattooed on his forehead.

‘I think we’re both after the same thing,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘It’s just that we’ve been coming at it from different starting points.’ Police and paramedics had begun to arrive on the scene now. ‘What a mess,’ Brian Jackson said. ‘Let’s go.’

Jackson hesitated. Shouldn’t he be helping, at the very least giving a statement about what he’d seen?

‘Innocent bystanders,’ Brian Jackson said, encouraging him in the direction of the escalator, like a sheepdog rounding up an obstinate ewe. ‘Come on, I’ve got someone you’d like to meet. Someone who’d like to meet you.’