And now the two of them, soft southerners to the core, were living in his homeland, his heartland, while every day he walked a step further away. And Julia living a country life as a country wife beggared belief. He could believe in a billion angels dancing on a pinhead more readily than he could believe in Julia cooking on an Aga. Yes, OK, the Dales weren't part of his heritage of dirt and industrial decay, but they were within the boundaries of God's own county, which was also Jackson's own county, flowing in the stream of his blood, laid down in the limestone of his bones even though neither ofhis parents was born here. Was it in his son's DNA, carried now in Jackson's pocket? The blueprint of his child. A chain of molecules, a chain of evidence. There would be traces of his sister in that single hair. Niamh, killed so long ago now that she existed more as a story than a person, a tale to be told, My sister was murdered when she was eighteen.

He took his BlackBerry out and put it on the table in front of him. He was half expecting a text message. Arrived safely. As none came, he texted, 'Miss you,Jx'. That passed a minute or two. He left the phone out so that he could see if he received a reply.

The old woman opposite sighed and closed her eyes as ifthe book she was reading had quite worn her out. The woman in red -neither lady nor librarian but a good old-fashioned tart (rather like Julia) could have been the same age as his strolling woman. Where was she now? Still walking up hill and down dale? The suit took out a battered-looking packet ofcheese and onion crisps from his briefcase and in a rather reluctant act of camaraderie silently offered them around.

The women refused but Jackson took a handful. He was starving and his chances of getting to the buffet car were minimal given the crush in the carriages. Lfever thou gavest meat or drink, the fire shall never make thee shrink. If meat or drink thou ne'er gavst nane, the fire will burn thee to the bare bane. That damned dirge. Had the suit bought his way into heaven with a packet of cheese and onion crisps? Jackson should have insisted that the old woman took his North Face jacket otherwise he might find himself shivering his way through the fires ofhell.

The crisps tasted unnatural and made him thirsty. There was a throbbing behind his eyes. He wanted to be home.

It was black outside the carriage window, not even a pinprick of light from a house, and rain lashed incessantly on the glass. It was deeply inhospitable out there. Where were they? He guessed somewhere in the no-man's-land between York and Doncaster. Closer to his birthplace. His birthright gone, sold off with the family silver in the eighties by That Woman.

Had they even stopped at York yet? If they had he hadn't noticed. He had a feeling he might have dozed off for a while.

He found himself thinking about Louise. They hadn't really kept in touch,just the occasional text from her when he suspected she was drunk. There'd never been anything between them, at least nothing that was ever spoken. Their relationship in Edinburgh two years ago could have been described as a professional one if you were playing fast and loose with the dictionary. They had never kissed, never touched, although Jackson was pretty sure she had thought about it. He certainly had. A lot.

Then a couple of months ago she announced that she was getting married, an event that seemed so unlikely (if not absurd) that he suspected she was joking. He had thought at one point that he might feature in her future and the next thing he knew he had been dropkicked into her past. They were two people who had missed each other, sailed right past in the night and into different harbours. The one that got away. He was sorry. He wished her well. Sort of.

How ironic that both Julia and Louise, the two women he'd felt closest to in his recent past, had both unexpectedly got married, and neither of them to him.

They passed through a station at speed and Jackson struggled and failed to read the name. 'Where was that?' he asked the woman in red.

'I didn't see, sorry.' She took out a mirror from her handbag and reapplied her lipstick, stretching her mouth and then baring her teeth to check for any smears. Jackson's suited neighbour tensed briefly and paused in his incessant typing, staring sightlessly at the laptop screen, not daring to look at the woman, but not quite able to keep his eyes away from her either. Some animal instinct briefly flared and flickered inside his suit but then it must have burned itself out because he slumped a little and returned to the tap-tap-tapping on his keyboard.

The woman in red ran her tongue over her lips and smiled at Jackson. He wondered if she was going to give him a tangible sign, nod in the direction of the toilets, expecting him to inch his way after her, squeezing past the blank-eyed squaddies to take her, thrusting urgently against the soap-and-grime-smeared little sink, with his hastily dropped trousers in an undignified pool around his ankles. For I am wanton and lascivious and cannot live without a wife. A memory of Julia, playing Helen in Doctor Faustus in a stripped-down production above a smoky London pub. Jackson wondered what, if anything, would drive him to be tempted to barter his soul to the devil, or indeed anyone. To save a life, he supposed. His child. (His children.) Would he follow the woman in red if she gave him the sign? Good question. He had never been what you would call promiscuous (and he had never once been unfaithful, making him almost a saint) but he was a man and he had taken it where he found it. Oh, Man, thy name is Folly.

When he glanced at her reflection in the dark glass of the window she was innocently reading her trashy rag again. Perhaps she hadn't been giving him the come-on after all, perhaps his imagination was charged by the foetid atmosphere of the carriage. He was relieved he'd been spared the test.

Julia had done it in train toilets with complete strangers, and once on a plane, although admittedly that had been with himself, not a stranger (at the time anyway, different now). Julia gobbled up life because she knew what the alternative was, her catalogue of dead sisters a constant reminder of life's fragility. He was glad she'd had a son, she might worry less for him than she would for a daughter.

And now, Amelia, the only sister she had left, had cancer, her breasts at this very moment being 'lopped off' according to Julia. They had spoken, briefly, on the phone, Jackson wanting to be sure that Julia wasn't at home before heading north to see his child. Their child.

'Poor, poor Milly,' Julia said, more choked up than usual. Grief always brought on her asthma.

Once, on holiday with Julia in sunnier times, he couldn't remember where now, Jackson remembered seeing a painting by some Italian Renaissance guy he'd never heard of, showing the martyred St Agatha holding her severed yet perfect breasts up high, on a plate, as if she were a waitress serving up a pair of blancmanges. No hint of the torture that had preceded this amputation -the sexual assaults, the stretching on the rack, the starvation, the rolling of her body over burning coals. St Agatha was a saint whom Jackson was acquainted with only too well -after his mother was diagnosed with the breast cancer that would kill her she had wasted a lot of her time praying to St Agatha, the patron saint of the disease.

He was shaken out of his thoughts by the old woman suddenly asking him if they had passed the Angel of the North and would she be able to see it in the dark? Jackson wasn't sure what to say to her -how to break the news that she was travelling the wrong way, that this train was bound for London, and she had endured several hours in cramped, unpleasant conditions and was now going to have to turn round and do it all over again. The next stop would probably be Doncaster, maybe Grantham, birthplace of That Woman, the very person who had single-handedly dismantled Britain. ('Oh, for God's sake,Jackson, give it a rest,' he heard his ex-wife's voice in his head.)