Then it had happened. He'd just about negotiated a hard bend and skidded inside, skidding almost into the wall of the tunnel he'd entered. Douglas fought hard to control the steering, but his reactions were terrible. And then...

Douglas shook his head as he'd done so often in the intervening years. It never did any good; the memories always came back to him. He remembered making it back home, putting the car away in his garage. He locked up and staggered around the side of the house, then just about made it inside to the bathroom to throw up, before carrying a bottle of vodka to bed with him for comfort. It had taken most of the bottle to put him out and when he woke the next morning, he'd thrown up again on the floor. Not all of it down to the drink. It was as he'd been straining that the events of the previous night came back to him. Afterwards he realized he had a decision to make; there wasn't the luxury of time on his side. Now he was sober Douglas considered doing the right thing, but then he'd lose everything he'd spent so long building up over the years. The fact that he was on the verge of losing it anyway didn't really register. Then he thought about the people he knew in the trade, some less law-abiding than others. People he'd done favors for, fixed claim forms for. They owed him, and if ever he needed to cash in those favors it was now.

He'd picked up the phone and made a few calls.

By the time everything was splashed over the papers he was in the clear. The car was put to rights quickly and sold on through some disreputable dealer using fake documents. It wasn't unusual for him to swap his car as often as his underpants, not in his line of work, so no one blinked twice when he acquired a new one.

But when Jane returned with the kids nothing was the same. She'd started nagging him even more about the booze, the restless nights.

"What's got into you these days?" she shouted at him that final evening when the girls were in bed.

"Leave me alone," he said as he turned his attention back to the drinks cabinet. "Just leave me alone."

"Not until you answer my question," she'd persisted, grabbing his arm.

He'd only meant to shrug her off, but she'd tumbled backwards and almost banged her head on the coffee table.

Douglas made a move towards her, to help her up. "Jane, I'm----"

She slapped his hand away, eyes filled with hatred. Jane rose and stormed off to the bedroom, calling back, "I'll leave you alone all right!" Then he heard the door slam and knew that she'd locked it from the inside.

The next day she left and took the kids with her. Her solicitor demanded that the house be sold and that she get most of the profits. He hadn't argued. Most----if not all----of the fight had gone out of him. Problem was, that meant he'd lost his edge at work as well. Within nine months he went from virtually running the place to losing his job completely.

The government forced him to look for jobs, but he always screwed something up and was sacked. In the end they stopped hassling him, realizing that he was, over time, building up a resumé that made him virtually unemployable. Now he just went down, signed on, did the courses they sent him to----the last one was something about spreadsheets----and he drew his money, most of which went to Jane and the kids, the rest on the essentials of life. Or hislife at any rate.

Which was how he came to be there, climbing the steps of the block of flats because the lift wasn't working (and someone had taken a shit inside it anyway). How he came to open the door and find someone waiting for him. Someone he recognized, but his brain told him that the man couldn't---- shouldn't----be sitting in his torn second-hand chair with the wooden arms, so when Douglas turned on the light the man almost frightened him senseless.

"You... you..." said Douglas, his hand outstretched and quivering.

"Yes," said the man. "Me."

"I-I'm imagining this. It's the drink."

"Always the drink," said the man in the chair.

Douglas rubbed his eyes, scrubbed at them, in fact. The apparition was still there. He looked slightly different, that was true----hair a bit longer and more unkempt----but there was no mistaking that face. It was the one Douglas saw every night when he woke up in a cold sweat; the face his mind had recorded that night as he'd swerved to avoid hitting the wall of the tunnel, only to hit something, some oneinstead.

It was the face of the man he'd killed seven years ago.

~

"I still don't understand. How do you know where to go?" Beth asked again. Robbins had answered the first time with a "You wouldn't believe me if I told you."

"I got a tip-off," said the DCI at last, letting the wheel slip through his fingers as he turned into a side road.

"From who?"

"That's not important, but... I believe what he said." Robbins had considered telling her about the conversation he'd had with his dead predecessor, but decided against it. If he began to go through it, he might just start to believe it wasn't just some bizarre dream. You could sleepwalk, why not sleep-smoke? The fact that he hadn't had any cigarettes on his person didn't come into it. "Just go through it again, what happened back at the hospital," he urged her.

She patiently explained about how 'Matthew' had been waiting for her when she got back, how they'd talked about the night of his accident and his hazy recollections. Then she related the incident in the Casualty Department. "I think something about the biker must have jolted his memory. They were in similar states."

"But you say he brought the man back to life?"

"That's what it looked like, at least. Davison, the doctor in charge, had called it. They'd given up the ghost."

Robbins pressed his foot down on the accelerator and they shot forward over a roundabout. "They might just have made a mistake."

"It's possible," Beth admitted. "But you had to have been there."

"I would have been if you'd called me."

"I was bringing him toyou. He would have bolted if I'd rung you first."

"As opposed to what he did anyway?"

Beth hugged herself. "I did what I thought was right, Steve."

He looked over at her briefly, then returned his eyes to the road.

Beth waited for the apology she knew would never come. Instead he said, "So what's the conclusion about him then? Any more theories?"

"Plenty, but all crazy. Right now I'm thinking, what if Matthew's got some kind of virus."

"What, you mean he's sick? I thought you said he had a high immunity."

"What if that's part of the disease? Something that makes you well. Better than well, in fact. What if it can bring you back from the dead?" Robbins gave a half laugh and before he could dismiss what she was saying, she continued: "It would explain the weird results from his blood test. Think about it, a disease that can regenerate dead tissue. That can restart a dead person's heart, make the blood flow again in their veins."

Robbins' eyes narrowed. "That's just----"

"Ludicrous? More ludicrous than a man who's been dead for seven years turning up on his own mother's doorstep? More ludicrous than opening his coffin and----"

"All right, all right. I get the picture," said Robbins. "If what you're saying turns out to be true----"

"And we won't know that until more tests are done," she broke in.

"Right, but if it is... it really will be the discovery of the century, the millennium."