Farther down the river two paramedics in fluorescent yellow jackets were walking methodically down the towpath, shining torches into the water and poking submerged objects with a long pole. Looking for a body, presumably.

A siren whooped and was immediately turned off. A car door slammed.

He glanced down at the water in front of him.

He had never really looked at the river this closely before. Not at night. Not when the level was up. He had always assumed that he would have no problems if he fell into any water. He was a decent swimmer. Forty lengths every morning whenever they stayed in a hotel with a pool. And when John Zinewski’s Fireball capsized he had been scared, briefly, but it had never occurred to him that he might drown.

This was different. It did not even look like water. It was moving too swiftly, coiling and eddying and rolling over on itself like a large animal. Upstream of the bridge it was heaped in front of the stanchions like lava negotiating a rock. Below the stanchions it vanished into a black sinkhole.

He could suddenly see how heavy water really was when it was moving en masse, like tar or treacle. It would drag you down or grind you against a concrete wall and there would be nothing you could do about it, however good a swimmer you were.

Someone had fallen in the river. He realized suddenly what this meant.

He imagined the first shock of the violent cold, then the desperate scrabble for a handhold on the bank, the stones greasy with moss, fingernails breaking, clothes becoming rapidly waterlogged.

But maybe this was what they had wanted. Maybe they had thrown themselves in. Maybe they had made no attempt to climb out, and the only struggle was the struggle to let go, to silence that hunger for light and life.

He pictured them trying to swim down into the dark. He recalled the passage on drowning in How We Die. He saw them trying to breathe water, their windpipe closing in spasm to protect the soft tissue of the lungs. With their windpipe closed they would have been unable to breathe. And the longer they spent not breathing the weaker they would become. They would start to swallow water and air. The water and the air would be churned into a foam and the whole grisly process would take on an unstoppable momentum. The foam would make them gag (these details had stuck really quite vividly in his memory). They would vomit. The vomit would fill their mouth and in that terminal gasp when the lack of oxygen in their bloodstream finally relaxed the spasm in their windpipe, they would have no option but to swallow it down, water, air, foam, vomit, the lot.

He had been at the riverside for five minutes. He had seen the helicopter ten minutes ago. God knows how long it had taken for the alarm to be raised, or the helicopter to arrive. Whoever it was they were almost certainly dead by now.

He felt some of the same horror he had felt on the train, but it did not overwhelm him this time. Indeed, it was balanced by a kind of solace. He could imagine doing this. The drama of it. The way you could imagine dying peacefully if only the right piece of music was playing. Like that Barber Adagio they always seemed to be playing on Classic FM when he was in the car.

It seemed so violent, suicide. But here, now, up close, it seemed different, more a case of doing violence to the body that kept you shackled to an unlivable life. Cutting it loose and being free.

He looked down again. Six inches beyond his toes the water heaved and slithered, now blue, now black in the revolving light from the police car.

41

Jean rang Jamie and got no answer. She rang Katie, but Katie was clearly busy and Jean didn’t want to be told that she was being paranoid, so she hung up before they had an argument.

She rang the hospital. She rang Virgin. She rang Wessex Trains and GNER. She rang the police and was told to ring back in the morning if he was still missing.

She had brought this on herself. By thinking of leaving him.

She tried to sleep, but every time she began to drift off she imagined a knock at the door and a young policeman standing on the step looking serious, and she felt sick and giddy and terrified, as if someone were about to hack off one of her limbs.

She finally got to sleep at five in the morning.

42

George was not in the mood for sitting in a restaurant. So he went into a newsagent’s and bought himself a tired sandwich, an orange and a slightly spotty banana.

He returned to his hotel room, made an instant coffee and ate his snack supper. Having done this, he realized that he had nothing left to do, and it was only a matter of time before his mind slipped its anchor and began to drift.

He opened the minibar and was about to remove a can of Carlsberg when he stopped. If he woke in the small hours and had to hold the forces of darkness at bay he was going to need his wits about him. He swapped the Carlsberg for a Mars bar and found the Eurosport channel on the television.

Five young men appeared, standing on a mountainous outcrop wearing helmets and rucksacks in the obligatory Day-Glo colors now worn by young people in the great outdoors.

George was working out how to increase the volume using the remote control when one of the young men turned unexpectedly, ran toward the precipice in the background and launched himself into the void.

George lunged at the television in an attempt to grab the man.

The shot altered and George saw the man plunging down a vast rock face. One, two, three seconds. Then his parachute opened.

George’s heart was still hammering. He changed channel.

On channel 45 a scientist received an electric shock, his hair stood on end and his skeleton became briefly visible. On 46 a group of pneumatically breasted women in bikinis gyrated to pop music. On 47 the camera panned over the aftermath of a terrorist outrage in a country with an incomprehensible language. On 48 there was an advert for cheap jewelry. On 49 there was a program about elephants. On 50 there was something in black-and-white with aliens.

If there were only four channels he might have been forced to watch one of them, but the sheer number was addictive and he went round the clock several times, pausing for a few seconds over each image until he became a little nauseous.

He opened the Ackroyd, but reading seemed an onerous task at this point in the evening, so he went next door and began running a bath.

He was getting undressed when he remembered that there were parts of his body he did not want to see. He turned the bathroom lights off and stripped to his vest and underpants, intending to remove these just prior to climbing into the bath.

But as he was sitting on the edge of the bed removing his socks he saw, on his left bicep, a constellation of tiny red dots. Six or seven, maybe. He rubbed at them, thinking they might be some kind of stain or clothing fluff, but they were neither. Nor were they tiny scabs. And rubbing did not remove them.

As the floor gave way over a wide, yawning shaft in the now-familiar manner he briefly consoled himself with the thought that he would not be thinking about Jean and David for a while.

The cancer was spreading. Either that or some new variety of cancer had taken root now that the first had weakened his immune system.

He had no idea how long the spots had been there. He had no memory of having ever examined his biceps in detail before. There was a voice in his head telling him that they had probably been there for years. There was another voice in his head saying that this meant they were symptoms of a process which had already done its deadly work below the surface.