Usually, round about this time of the evening Banjo would sit by the back door and start to whine and Reggie would say to him, 'Come on then, poor wee scone, time for your constitutional,' and Banjo would waddle unsteadily along the street to his favourite gatepost where he would awkwardly lift an arthritic leg. He could just about make it to the gatepost but usually had to be carried back. Reggie was always surprised when she lifted him up in her arms how little he weighed compared to the baby.

Ms MacDonald lived in a housing estate that almost backed on to the East Coast main line. The whole house shook every time an express train hurtled past. Ms MacDonald was so used to trains that she didn't even hear the regular earthquakes they caused, at least not if the trains were running to timetable. Occasionally, over tea, Ms MacDonald would suddenly cock an ear, in much the same way that Banjo used to before he lost his hearing, and say something like, 'That can't be the six-twenty Aberdeen to King's Cross, can it?'

Reggie, on the other hand, heard every train. They gave her an odd feeling in the pit of her stomach when she heard them approaching, something fearful and primitive (atavistic!) and she wondered if her Stone Age brain thought the train was a woolly mammoth or a sabre-toothed tiger or whatever other creatures sent her ancestors running to the back of the cave because Dr Hunter said that 'after all' we still had the DNA of Palaeolithic hunter-gatherers and as far as she could see we hadn't evolved biologically and emotionally and we were all still Stone Age people with 'a thin veneer of culture and sophistication on top. Strip that off and we're back to basics, Reggie -love, hate, food, survival. Although not necessarily in that order.' It was certainly a theory that helped to explain Billy.

Tonight Banjo was lethargic and showed no interest in going out, lying instead in front of the heat of the gas fire. Reggie was grateful, it was a horrible night, gusts of wind repeatedly lifting and dropping the brass knocker on Ms MacDonald's front door so that it sounded as if an unseen visitor was desperate to get in. Cathy come home to Wuthering Heights. Mum's ghost looking for Reggie. Back soon. Je reviens. Or just nobody and nothing.

Fast falls the eventide; the darkness deepens.

Rapture Ready EVERYONE WAS FASTIDIOUSLY IGNORING THE DRUNK GUY WHO WAS lying completely immobile on the floor and Jackson felt a twinge of guilt. He had once arrested someone for being drunk and disorderly and it turned out the man was suffering from a bleed in the brain as a result ofa concussion and had nearly died right there in the holding cell. Bearing this in mind, he knelt down to inspect the prostrate form on the carriage floor.

His position gave him a close-up view of the feet of the woman in red, clad in a pair of ferocious spiked heels, shoes that were half-fetish, half-weapon. A banshee of a woman had once attacked him with the heel of her shoe when he'd been trying to wrangle a hen night that had got out of hand, giving a whole new meaning to the words 'killer heels'. The mother of the bride, he seemed to remember, had been the owner of the shoe. He was trying to recall what Cambridge pub that had been in at the same time as checking the drunk guy's vital signs (who said men couldn't multi-task) when the train suffered another jolt, and then a rapid series ofjolts, each one worse than the one before. The train started to speed up, which really didn't seem like a good thing in the circumstances. There was a smell ofburning -rubber and something unpleasantly chemical -accompanied by a high-pitched shrieking noise as ifmetal was grating on metal. Jackson could actually feel the train swaying as ifit was trying to keep its balance.

Christ, here we go, he thought. Not bound for London, not bound for glory, this train was bound for hell.

People screamed, the woman in red included. Jackson tried to reach out and reassure her (or at least get her to stop screaming) but the carriage started to tip to one side and she slipped out ofhis sight.

Jackson hoped there were angels in the cab with the driver, he hoped the driver could hardly breathe for the amount of wing feathers in the air and that he had Gabriel himself as his wingman. It went without saying that Jackson didn't believe in angels but in extremis he was always willing to give credence to anything. Indeed, he hoped that well-known hobo, the Angel of the North, had caught a ride at Gateshead and was even now directing his rusty flock in how to ride the rails.

The song 'Jesus Take The Wheel' came into his head and he thought he might not go quite that far but he wouldn't mind if the Virgin Mary took her foot off the dead man's handle and slowed them up a bit.

The carriage suddenly righted itself andJackson had just begun to think that they might be OK when it just as suddenly canted over again, only this time it flipped through ninety degrees on to its side. The train terminates at TVczverley the old woman had said, but she was wrong after all. It terminated here.

You can't fight a train crash. People and luggage were thrown around indiscriminately in a grotesque jumble, lit only by the sparks from metal on metal and the occasional unpleasant light intermittently shed by something electrical that was shorting overhead. Instinctively, Jackson tried to protect the drunk guy by throwing himself on top ofhim. If he'd had time for a considered decision this wasn't the person he would have chosen to save (babies, children, women, animals, in that order, was his preferred roster). It made no difference anyway because he was discovering that a derailing train didn't give you much choice about where you went and what you did. And trying to hang on to something was futile when everything was in cataclysmic, chaotic freefall. The noise was territying, unlike anything he'd experienced before (even war), and there seemed to be no end to it as the train, or at any rate the carriage they were in, kept on travelling on its side. He supposed time had expanded as it did in all accidents but how long could it carryon for? What if it went on for ever? What ifthis was hell? Was he dead? Did everything hurt this much when you were dead?

Finally it came to a stop. They were in pitch darkness and for a second, as if time was suspended, absolutely no sound. For an eerie moment Jackson wondered if everyone else was dead. Then people started to cry out, groaning and screaming. Perhaps this was hell? Darkness, the smell of burning, children crying for their mothers, mothers crying for their children, general lamenting and weeping. In Jackson's book you didn't get much closer to hell than that.

Someone close by whimpered like a dog in pain. A woman, it sounded like the woman in red, kept saying the word 'No' over and over again. A mobile phone rang, the ringtone incongruously the theme from The High Chaparral. A man's voice murmured, 'Help me, please someone help me.' Jackson, the sheepdog, always had a Pavlovian response to a plea for help but he couldn't work out which direction the words had come from -there was no up or down, no backwards or forwards any more. He could feel something warm and wet that he thought might be blood but he had no idea ifit was his own or someone else's. He was surrounded by dark shapes and objects that might have been bags or bodies, it was impossible to tell. He could feel broken glass everywhere around him and when he gingerly made a move he heard a soft cry of pain. 'Sorry,' Jackson murmured.

He tried to work out the orientation of the carriage. He was pretty sure they hadn't rolled completely over so there should be windows where the roof had been. The smell of burning was growing stronger all the time, there was no emergency lighting but there was a dull glow in the distance that didn't augur well and there was the foul smell of an electrical fire. The train needed evacuating in double-quick time.