He decided to manoeuvre over to where he thought the roof was (a trail of' Sorry's), thinking it might be easier to get some purchase there if he was going to climb up towards the window.

'Help me,' the voice said again and Jackson realized it was coming from beneath him, from someone he was actually crawling over. Jesus. Climb over seats, climb over people, forget anything your mother ever taught you about manners but it didn't work like that, not in reality. (In the other time dimension that he was occupying, where life was continuing as normal and he wasn't expecting to die at any moment, he wanted to sit down and write a note to posterity, to Marlee, that said, You'll want to stop and help other people. Don't!)

Jackson shifted his weight as much as he could. 'All right, mate,' he said, one injured soldier to another, 'we'll get you out of here.' Leave no man behind. He explored warily, got his arms around the guy's chest as if he was saving him from drowning, pulling him to shore. Heaving and dragging him over to where he thought the roof was. If he'd been thinking logically he might have considered the risk of spinal injury from hauling someone like a sack of coals, but there was no logic in this mayhem. One at a time, he thought. I'll get them out one at a time.

And then suddenly, with no warning, the two of them were falling through nothingness. Jackson clung on to the man as they performed their odd waltz into the abyss, Butch and Sundance going over the cliff. A bit ofJackson's brain was going What the fuck? while another bit was wondering where they were going to land. There was another more paranoid part of his brain that was worrying that they were never going to land at all. Why this is hell, nor am lout ofit. (And he slagged offJulia for quoting at inappropriate times.)

Then it was over. They landed with a sickening thud, parachutists without a parachute, and rolled down a steep incline before coming finally to a stop. He banged his head hard when they landed, he felt sick with the pain of it. He lay on his back for a second trying to breathe, sometimes breathing was all you could manage. Sometimes breathing was enough. He remembered lying on the road after his showdown with the sheep this afternoon (really only this afternoon?) looking at the pale sky. There were days that really surprised you with the way they turned out.

The rain falling on his face revived him a little and he managed to struggle to a sitting position. He was shivering with cold, with the onset of shock. There were lights somewhere and he realized that they weren't in the middle of nowhere after all, there were houses, strung out along the track, and now there were voices as the first people arrived at the scene, civilians not professionals, he could hear their confusion as they encountered a whole new definition for nightmare.

Jackson understood what had happened now. He had been trying to find the roof of the carriage but there had been no roof to find it had peeled back like the top of a sardine can and Jackson and his accidental new companion had plunged straight out of the train and down an embankment and now they were lying in a kind of gully. The man he had fallen with (Help me) lay without moving, face down in the mud a few feet away. Jackson dragged himself over to him. He didn't have the strength to roll him over, he seemed to have hurt his arm when he fell, and the best he could do was to turn the man's head to the side to stop him suffocating in the mud. He thought of his grandfather's brother, going over the top at the Somme, drowning in the mud at Passchendaele.

A light appeared at the top of the embankment, a torch, providing enough faint light for Jackson to see his companion's face. For some reason he had presumed it was either the young drunk guy or the tired suit and he was surprised to see that it was one of the squaddies. He looked pretty much dead. Survive a war where death stalks you at every moment and then find yourself picked off on the East Coast main line.

Jackson had thought the torch signalled rescue but the light disappeared as quickly as it had appeared and Jackson shouted 'Hey,' his voice coming out as a reedy croak. He started trying to clamber up the embankment. He had to get more people out of the train. People who were still alive preferably. He got about halfway up and had to stop, suddenly as weak as a kitten. There was something wrong, he'd been injured in some way but he wasn't sure how. It dawned on him, unexpectedly, that it was bad. Combat injury. He needed medevacking out of the field. He slipped back down the embankment.

*

He could feel the lifeblood ebbing away. On a couple of previous occasions when Jackson had found himself facing the possibility of death he had clung on to life because he considered himself too young to die. Now it struck him that that wasn't really the case any more, he felt plenty old enough to die.

I cut mine arm, and with my proper blood, assure my soul to be great Lucifer's. He was going to quote himself to death ifhe wasn't careful. Jesus, his arm really was bleeding, pumping the stuff out like there was no tomorrow. There wasn't going to be a tomorrow, was there? He had finally run out of road. You're a long way from home now, Jackson, he thought.

He closed his eyes, ifhe could sleep for a minute he might be able to make it back up to the top. A nagging little voice in his head was trying to remind him that if he went to sleep now it would be the big one, the last one. He debated this idea briefly and decided he didn't mind if he never woke up again. He was surprised, he had expected to fight at the end but it was actually a relief to close his eyes. He was so tired. His thoughts ran briefly on the woman walking in the dale. He had feared for her safety when it was himself he should have been worried for.

So this was how the world ended. This ae nighte, this ae nighte, every nighte and aile, fire and fleet and candle-lighte, and Christ receive thy saule.

Or the devil. He supposed he would find out soon enough. He struggled to eradicate the enigmatic walking woman from his mind and put in its place a picture ofMarlee's face (Missing you! Love you!). He wanted her face to be the last thing he saw before he went into the black tunnel.

The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie SHE SHOULD HAVE GOT THE FLOWERS, SHE SHOULD HAVE GONE TO Waitrose, but here she was parked outside Alison Needler's house in Livingston. The curtains were drawn, the porch light off. No sign of life within or without now, everything calmed down again. When she heard Alison's hysterical voice on the phone Louise had expected the worst -he was back. But he wasn't, it turned out to be a false alarm, not David Needler come back to finish off his family but some innocent bystander in a baseball cap walking his dog. Not that innocent actually as the dog in question was a Japanese Tosa, according to one of the Livingston uniforms who had turned up in response to Alison Needler slamming her hand on her panic button.

The innocent bystander was arrested and taken down to the station to be charged under the Dangerous Dogs Act and the dog was carted off by a cautious vet. The squad car was already there when Louise turned up so all in all they had provided quite a circus outside Alison Needler's so-called safe house. Why not just put a big flashing neon sign on the roof saying, 'If you're looking for Alison Needler, David, she's right here'.

It wasn't the first false alarm, Alison's nerves were tuned as tight as piano wires twenty-four hours a day. Her life was a train wreck. Louise would like to introduce Alison Needler to Joanna Hunter. Alison would see that it was possible to survive with grace, that there could be life after death. But, of course, the big difference was that Andrew Decker had been caught whereas David Needler -dead or alive -was still out there somewhere. If they could find him, if they could put him away for the rest of his life then perhaps Alison Needler could start to live again. (But what did 'life' mean? In Andrew Decker's case thirty years, plenty of life left for him to live.)