'OK, let's roll,' Jackson said. The dog was already asleep on the back seat.

In a triumph of idiocy over adversity they made it as far as Scotch Corner, only stopping twice at service stations so that Jackson could 'take a few minutes'. His body craved rest, it wanted to be supine in a darkened room, not driving with one hand on the A1. He was surfing a wave of strong painkillers given to him by Australian Mike. He was sure that if he looked closely at the label it would have some warning about not driving with them in his system but from somewhere he had dredged up his army self, the one that kept pushing through beyond the bounds of reason. When the going gets tough, the tough take drugs.

Reggie was making a meal of navigating. She had the disturbing habit, shared with his daughter, his real daughter, of gleefully verbalizing (and occasionally singing) every road sign -hidden dip, sharp bend, Berwick-on-Tweed twenty-four miles, roadworks for half a mile.

He had never had a front-seat passenger apart from Marlee who could get so much enjoyment from the Al.

'I don't get out much,' she said cheerfully.

She had an address for the dubious aunt. It was in a Filofax that belonged to Joanna Hunter. Reggie also had her own bulky backpack,Joanna Hunter's large handbag which she was concerned with to the point of obsession (My would she leave it behind? My?), a plastic carrier bag containing dog food, plus the dog itself, of course. She didn't travel light. Jackson had, literally, the clothes he stood up in. It was a kind of freedom, he supposed.

'Here, here, we have to go right here,' Reggie said urgently as they approached the big junction at Scotch Corner.

Tomorrow he would see his wife. His wife, shiny and brand new. And have a lot of new-wife kind of sex, although to be honest, sex was the last thing he felt capable of at the moment. A warm bed and a large whisky sounded much more appealing. He would go home and carryon with his life. His journey had been broken (but not fatally), he had been broken (but not fatally), although he had a small, nagging doubt that he might not have been put back together in quite the same way as before.

'Right at Scotch Corner,' Reggie said, 'and that takes us into Wensleydale. Where the cheese comes from.'

He had been here on Wednesday (in the pre-train-crash world. A different country.). He had bought his OS map in Hawes, a newspaper, a cheese and pickle roll. They would pass within a cat's whisker of where his son, Nathan, lived. They could visit, stop off at the village green, they could park outside Julia's house. He was back where he had started. Again.

At Scotch Corner he had been obediently following Reggie's slightly hysterical instructions to go right when some kind of slippage occurred, in the car, in him, he wasn't sure. He wondered ifhe'd been asleep with his eyes open. This was what happened when you drove in the aftermath of a concussion, you didn't turn the wheel far enough and then you tried to compensate by turning it too far and then you made the mistake of slamming on the brakes too violently, mainly because of a small frantic Scottish voice yelling in your ear and disturbing the gyroscope in your brain so that you skidded in a scream of rubber and clipped a four-door Smart Car, sending it spinning like a top across the road and you were yourself clipped by an army jeep coming from Catterick Camp. The Espace gave as good as it got but they still ended up facing the wrong way, slewed on the verge, with their teeth rattling in their heads. The dog had fallen on the floor when they Gackson sharing the blame equally with the car) lost control but picked itself up now with a certain aplomb.

'Phew,' Reggie said when they finally came to a stop.

'Fuck,' Jackson said.

'Take a deep breath, sir,' the traffic cop said, 'and then breathe out into this monitor.' He held out a digital breathalyser the size of a mobile phone towards Jackson who sighed and said, 'I haven't been drinking,' but he supposed he looked in such poor shape that any sensible officer of the law would be suspicious of him.

No one was injured, which was a relief. One disastrous crash was enough for anyone's week. 'It's me,' Reggie said gloomily, 'I attract these things.' They had helped out the dazed passengers from the Smart Car and sat them down at the side of the road. The army guys had put hazard lights out and phoned the police.

'Fuckwit,' one of them muttered at Jackson. Jackson tended to agree with him.

Despite the fact that the breath test was negative the traffic cop wasn't happy. 'Mr Decker, sir?' he said, scrutinizing his driving licence. 'Is this your vehicle?'

'It's a rental.'

'And what relation is this young lady to you?'

'I'm his daughter,' Reggie piped up. The traffic cop looked her up and down, took in her bruises, the large dog glued to her side, the variety of bags she was toting. He frowned. 'How old are you?' 'Sixteen.' He raised an eyebrow at her.

'S weartogod.'

An ambulance arrived, surplus to requirements, like Joy. Another unnecessary one followed on behind, siren wailing. By now it looked like a major accident scene, traffic cones, lane closures, emergency vehicles, a lot of noise on the police radios, God knows how many attending officers, including a large incident van. Considering that no one was injured, not even walking wounded, the tension and excitement in the air seemed out ofproportion to the circumstances. Perhaps it was a slow day on the A1.

'I used to be a policeman,' he said to the officer who had breathalysed him.

He hadn't had much of a positive response to this statement lately but he wasn't expecting to be suddenly brought down by two officers who seemed to come out ofnowhere and who flattened him to the tarmac before he could say anything helpful, like 'Mind my arm because you're ripping my stitches out.' Luckily, Reggie had a good pair of lungs for someone so small and jumped up and down a lot asking them if they couldn't see his arm was in a sling and that he was an injured man -which didn't go down well with the army boys who wanted to know why he was driving at all then, but Reggie was more than a match for a bunch of squaddies. It was like watching a Jack Russell fending off a pack of Dobermanns.

A police radio crackled and he heard a voice say, 'Yeah, we've got the nominal here,' and Jackson wondered who the wanted man was that they'd collared. He sat on the road while Reggie inspected his arm. At least he wasn't pumping out blood like spilled petrol all over the road, just a couple of stitches out, although he still felt squeamish when he looked at the wound in his arm. Reggie was coaxed away by one of the paramedics and then, without warning, a police officer cuffed his good arm and, speaking into the radio on his shoulder, said, 'We're taking the nominal to hospital: so it turned out that Jackson was the wanted man. He couldn't think why but somehow it didn't surprise him.

Sitting in the A and E waltmg room in hospital in Darlington, bookended by two police officers as silent as funeral mutes, Jackson pondered why they were treating him like a criminal. Driving on someone else's licence? Kidnapping and beating up a minor (I'm sixteen!)? What had happened to his unshakeable little Scottish shadow? He hoped she was giving his details to reception and not locked up in custody somewhere. (The dog was in the back of a police car awaiting a verdict on its immediate future.) Not that Reggie knew his details. He had a wife and a child (two children) and a name. That was all anyone needed to know really.

Another couple of uniforms put in an appearance and one of them cautioned him and passed on the interesting information that there was a warrant out for his arrest.

'Are you going to tell me why?'

'Failure to comply with the conditions imposed on you when you were released from prison.'