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table so many times, held Hope’s hand, helped to bath Nick when he could be cradled in the crook of one arm. Hope knew she had her best interests at heart.
    ‘Oh, thanks,’ said Hope. She looked away. ‘Well, the site can run itself but I don’t earn any money that way … ’
    ‘Of course, of course,’ said Fiona. ‘Thanks for the tea.’
    ‘That’s fine.’
    Fiona gave a tight smile. She reached into her tunic pocket and took out a small yellow-and-white carton, about the size of an aspirin packet. Printed at the top of one side was
SynBio
in friendly, flowery pink font. She placed it on the table, carefully, but her hand shook a little and Hope heard a hollow, plasticky rattle.
    ‘Just in case you change your mind,’ Fiona said. ‘One tablet, down with water. The sooner the better, obviously, but it can sort out quite a lot even after six months.’
    Hope shifted her gaze from the packet to Fiona’s face. She flexed one shoulder.
    ‘Sorry,’ she said.
    Fiona made for the hall.
    ‘You will think about it, won’t you?’ she said as she shrugged into her fleece.
    ‘I’ll think about it,’ said Hope, opening the door.
    Fiona gave her a tight smile and went out, into the now thicker snow. Hope got the door closed before she started crying. Fiona wasn’t a villain. Fiona was just a person who represented an impersonal system closing in and grinding them down. That was how Hope saw her.
    That morning, Hugh arrived at his work shortly after 9.30. He wasn’t late: as far as he was concerned, the billed-for day began when he set off on his bicycle, and he’d set off at 8.00 prompt. The shower had ended as he reached Acton – or rather, he was out from under its cloud, which he could see behind him whenever heglanced over his shoulder. Which was often, given that many of the vehicles on the road were almost as quiet as his bike, and a lot faster and heavier, and the cyclists more dangerous than any of them. Unlike most of the heavier vehicles, bikes were steered by humans, and almost all by cyclists. Hugh rode a bike, but he didn’t consider himself a cyclist.
    As he whizzed through the traffic and raced across junctions and around roundabouts, Hugh found himself preoccupied – though not distracted, because the parts of his brain that dealt with cycling in traffic had long since laid down reflexes that operated below the level of his conscious thought – by the vision, indeed the full-sensory hallucination he’d had the previous evening. Sight, sound and smell; and to all appearances an awareness of Hugh’s presence, though perhaps not that of anyone or anything else in the hall or in the house.
    Hugh, for reasons that will later become painfully clear, was a confirmed scoffer about anything that smacked of the supernatural or even of the paranormal. He was less troubled by his visions than might be supposed. In his early teens he had read with delight the poem of Lucretius, in a tatty old paperback published by Sphere Books in 1969 with a Max Ernst picture on the cover. He’d found it in the attic of his parents’ house, which had once been a Free Church manse, amid a stash of dusty old rationalist works, presumably from the minister’s library. (Hugh had only made sense of this when he’d noticed that most of the books were critiques of the historical record of the Roman Catholic Church.) On the inside cover, the pencilled words were just legible:
     
Here rolls
The large verse of Lucretius, who raised
His index-finger and did strike the face
Of fleeting Time, leaving a scar of thought
The rain of ages shall not wash away.
     
    No source for the quote was given. For years, Hugh had attributed the lines to the long-departed minister himself, inspired no doubt by the prevailing weather of his parish. It was an obscure thrill imparted by the lines that impelled him to turn over the pages of the book, and then to read it. He found a great deal in those pages that left imprints on his brain, but none