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was route five. 8 am and thirty degrees.
    He followed the main B-road through the village centre. When the road swung west he turned north-east, following the single-track. Memory was brighter here, out in the open fields.
    At the end of the track a building site had replaced the old farm. Back then, it was a spooky place, the residents vanished but the rooms still full of furniture, crockery and chairs, like one of those fake homes at ground-zero of a nuclear test site. But where Fletcher once played hide and seek in the barn or made dens among the straw bales, seven Aspirational Executive Homes were emerging.
    The seven annoyed him. Six was neater. He should tell this to the show-home salesman, while making clear that he too was aspirational. He aspired to simple things like familiarity. Otherwise the bearing became unsteady, like those precarious, five-high towers of bales, the musty tunnels between them which they knew like moles, the clearings where they sat in an utter, stifling darkness. They thought nothing of collapse, or rats. They were completely fearless.
    He turned his back on the houses and faced the yellow patchwork of the rape and wheat fields. The bone-dry earth smelled warm, occasional scuffs of wind lifting and dispersing clouds of dust, making him think of distant explosions on a desert horizon. His hands began to sweat and he wiped them on his new jeans, the pair he’d stolen from a washing line the night before. No more shiny half-masts. He’d wrapped them round a stone and flung them in the river.
    A hundred metres or so back down the road he jumped over a fence into a small copse of birch trees, an island in the sea of yellow. He did this a lot as a kid. Sitting and drowsing, dapples behind his eyelids as the sun strobed through the leaves. His aunt called him a day-waster .
    He opened his eyes when he heard a steady pad, pad, pad coming from the road. The runner soon passed and Fletcher hurried to the fence and vaulted over. He’d settled down cross-legged by the roadside just as the man turned at the new houses and ran back the way he’d come. He glanced nervously at Fletcher as he passed, alarmed by the sudden apparition.
    â€˜Nice day.’
    â€˜Nice day,’ repeated the runner.
    He resisted the urge to run alongside and ambled after him instead, stopping to watch a bright red combine harvester work the wheat. A fog of dust lifted into the hazing blue and a buzzard turned elegantly on a thermal. He followed the hawk down through its spirals, closer and larger, pointing it out to a young couple with a pram who were just passing.
    â€˜A lot of them about these days,’ he said.
    â€˜More and more.’
    â€˜Better keep an eye on that baby.’
    â€˜Eh?’
    â€˜They take small animals, you know.’
    The man frowned and Fletcher wanted to apologise but didn’t. Instead, he smiled. His aunt would be furious. She was the mistress of politeness and cuffed him round the ear if he forgot to say Mr this or Mrs that. She was also the most slanderous bitch he’d ever met. Fletcher watched the couple walking away. Their baby had started screaming and they looked back a few times. He wondered if they were going to Mortensen’s party that evening.
    * * *
    The front door of End Point was wide open. Fletcher walked past at eight and eight thirty. By nine he estimated about twenty people inside. Not enough for decent cover but he decided to go for it. A quick ten minutes, in and out. When he crossed the street and stepped inside it was for the first time in twenty-three years. He stood in the hall, waiting for an emotion that didn’t come.
    The partygoers were mostly around his age but belonged to a different species. There was no way into their conversations: the bobo-chic housewife, whinnying like a pony about the unshakeable integrity of Bono ; the technocrat in deck shoes with his jolly little escape pad in Provence …
    He let himself into only one