He passed a fence post that had a bird of prey, a hawk or falcon, perched on top ofit like a finial. Jackson was no good at the naming of birds. He knew buzzards though, there was a pair above him, circling idly in a holding pattern above the moorland, like black paper silhouettes. TY=hen thou from hence away art past, every nighte and aile, to TY=hinnymuir thou com'st at last, and Christe receive thy saule. Jesus, where had that come from? School, that was where. Rote-learning, still in fashion when Jackson was a boy. 'The Lyke Wake Dirge'. His first year at secondary school, before his life went off the rails. He suddenly saw himself, standing in front of the coal fire in their little house, reciting the poem one evening for a test the next day. His sister Niamh listening and correcting as if she was catechizing him. He could smell the coal, feel the heat on his legs, bare in the grey woollen shorts of his uniform. From the kitchen came the scents of the peasant food their mother was cooking for tea. Niamh slapped him on his leg with a ruler when he forgot the words. Looking back, he was astonished at the amount of casual brutality in his family (his sister almost as bad as his brother and father), the punches and slaps, the hair-tweaking, ear-pulling, Chinese burns -a whole vocabulary of violence. It was the nearest they could get to expressing love for each other. Maybe it was something to do with the bad mix ofScots and Irish genes that their parents had brought to the union. Maybe it was lack of money or the harsh life of a mining community. Or maybe they just liked it. Jackson had never hit a woman or a child, he restricted himself entirely to dulling up his own sex. if hos'nand shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane, every nighte and aile, the whinnes shall prick thee to the bare bane; and Christe receive thy saule.

A whinny was a thorn, he remembered that. Trust his school to set a dirge for its first-year pupils to learn, for God's sake. What did that say about the Yorkshire character? And not just a dirge, but the journey of a corpse. A testing. As you sow so shall you reap. Do as you would be done by. Give away your shoes in this life and you'll be shod for your hike across the thorny moor in the next life. This ae nighte, this ae nighte, every nighte and alleJire and fleet and candle-lighte, and Christe receive thy saule. Jackson shivered and turned the heater up.

*

It seemed he was not alone on the road to nowhere after all. There was someone else ahead, on foot, walking towards him. It was so unexpected that for a moment he wondered if it was a kind of mirage, brought on by staring for too long at the road, but no, it wasn't a phantom, it was definitely a human being, a woman even. He slowed down as he approached her. Not a walker or a tourist, she was dressed in a longish cardigan, blouse and skirt, moccasin-type shoes. Her only concession to the weather was a hand-knitted scarf twined casually round her neck. Fortyish, he guessed, brown-to-grey hair in a bob, something of the librarian about her. Did librarians live up to their cliche? Or were they indulging in uninhibited sex behind every stack and carrel? Jackson had not set foot inside a library for some years now.

The walking woman had no distinguishing marks. No dog either. Her hands were thrust into her cardigan pockets. She wasn't walking, she was strolling. From nowhere to nowhere. It felt all wrong. He came to a stop and rolled down the window.

As the woman neared the car she gave him a smile and a nod. 'Can I give you a lift?' he asked. (,Don't ever take lifts from strangers, not even if you 'ye lost in the middle ofnowhere, not ifthey say they know your mother, that they have a puppy in the back, that they're a policeman. ')

The woman laughed in a pleasant way -no fear or suspicion -and shook her head. 'You're going the wrong way,' she said. Local accent. She gestured with her arm in the direction he had just come from and said, 'I've not got far to go.'

'It looks like snow,' Jackson said. Why wasn't she wearing a coat, did they breed them to be more hardy up here? She contemplated the sky for a moment and then said to him, 'Oh, no, I don't think so. Don't worry about it,' before giving him a kind of half-wave and carrying on with her unseasonable saunter. He could hardly pursue her, either on foot or in the car, she would think he was a psycho. She must be heading for a farmhouse that he had missed. Perhaps it was in a dip, or over the brow of a hill. Or invisible. 'As we say in this part of the world,' he said to the Discovery, 'there's nowt so queer as folk.'

The day was dimming down and he wondered how dark it would be when the winter sun finally gave up the struggle. Country dark, he supposed. He switched on his lights.

In his rear-view mirror, he watched the woman growing smaller and smaller until she disappeared into the gathering dusk. She never looked back. In her shoes, in her librarian moccasins, he would definitely have looked back.

He was a man on the road, a man trying to get home. It was about the destination, not the journey. Everyone was trying to get home. Everyone, everywhere, all the time.

It was dark now. He drove on,just a poor wayfaring stranger. Was he progressing from this world to that which was to come? You're going the wrong way, she had said. She had meant he was going the wrong way for her. Hadn't she? Or was there a message in her words? A sign? Was he going the wrong way, the wrong way for what? The road had to end up somewhere, even ifit was where it began. 'Don't,' he said out loud to himself. 'Don't get into that existential crap.' Yea, though I walk through the valley ifthe shadow of death.

Just when he had decided that they were lost for ever in the Twilight Zone, they drove over the brow of a hill and he saw the glittering lights ofvehicles on the A1 down below, the lost highway, a great grey artery of logic, helping to speed cars from one known destination to another. Alleluia.

She Would Get the Flowers Herself SHE WOULD DRIVE INTO TOWN AND GO TO MAXWELL'S IN CASTLE Street and get the florist to put something together for her, something elegant. Blue, for the living room -a flat-backed basket arrangement for the fireplace -would he have delphiniums? Was it too late for delphiniums? Of course, it didn't matter what the season was, florists didn't get their flowers from gardens, they got them from glasshouses in Holland. And Kenya. They grew flowers in Kenya where there probably wasn't enough drinking water for the people who lived there, let alone for irrigating flowers, and then they flew the flowers over in planes that dumped tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. It was wrong but she needed flowers.

Could you need a flower? When they went shopping for her engagement ring in Alistir Tait's in Rose Street, Patrick said to the jeweller, 'This beautiful woman needs a big diamond.' It sounded corny in retrospect but it had been charming at the time. Sort of. Patrick chose an old diamond in a new setting and Louise wondered what poor bugger had dug that out of the heart of darkness a long time ago. Blood on her hands.

Patrick was an orthopaedic surgeon and was used to being in charge. 'Orthopaedics is just hammers and chisels really, a superior form ofjoinery,' he joked when he first met her but he was at the top of his field and could probably have been making a fortune in private practice but instead he spent his time sticking NHS patients back together with pins. ('That's where a boyhood playing with a Meccano set gets you.')

Louise had never liked doctors, nobody who'd been at university with medical students would ever trust a doctor. (Was Joanna Hunter the exception to the rule?) And how did they choose doctors? They took middle-class kids who were good at science subjects and then spent six years teaching them more science and then they let them loose on people. People weren't science, people were a mess. 'Well, it's one way of looking at it,' Patrick laughed.