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am going to pick everything up from you some time in the next week or two.
    Paula Adonor laughed. I’m sorry, she said. I just can’t get used to the idea that you are sitting in the driver’s seat with your hands free.
    He laughed too, signed out, returned his vision to the road and tried to anticipate where the story might be leading. Paula had said, as she had done before, that she hoped he might find something conclusive about what had happened to Vernon Crane, but for Alex Hargreaves this was a secondary concern. He felt sure he was dead, or as good as dead.
    After an hour or so he suddenly felt surprisingly tired and half contemplated crawling over into the back seat, but then a little jolt of panic brought him round enough to check that the car was locked on the right coordinates. Yes, fine. He had been so busy the past few days that he had only managed a couple of hours a night and now it had crept up on him. The seat reclined smoothly and in a few seconds he was asleep and dreaming.
    He awoke dry-mouthed, the faint after-image of something star-shaped and livid green bruising his vision. He had the sense that some important, secret work had been undertaken as he slept, neural networks connecting, new pathways forged. Routes, chan- nels, streams.
    The car hadn’t pulled into the last bay of the Express route as he had instructed it to, and he sat up disoriented and looked around, reaching for a bottle of Elite Sports water from the glove compartment. Instead he was pulled up onto the grass verge of a minor road somewhere.
    He got out of the car to stretch his legs. There was a gap in the trees, a field and beyond what looked like a quarry, an artificial lake. A nice, spring morning. How had he got here? With the pins and needles shaken out of his legs he got back in the car, scrolled through the instruction log and saw that getthere claimed he had turned off automatic drive and returned to manual three hours before. The GPS coordinates had been set for here.
    He had another sip of water. Had he woken up, driven out here and fallen asleep again? Apparently so. He stretched. Ah, yes, the cottage, he had been talking to Paula Adonor about it, had got a rough lock on its location, but he couldn’t see anything other than fields and trees. He had thought he might perhaps drive out there from Castleford on the way back if time permitted, but it seemed as though he was already one step ahead of himself, busy sorting and arranging his life without his conscious consent.
    Well, he smiled, efficiency is one of those side-benefits that Deveretol advocates like to talk of. Sit back, he said to himself, just sit back and enjoy the ride.
    Bohemian Books was on a side street in what Alex Hargreaves took to be the centre of town, though every street resembled a side street. This was a town that anyone with an ounce of aspiration immediately got out of, that much was immediately and abundantly clear. Thank god it was a sunny day. He couldn’t imagine how depressing this parade of boarded up facades, kebab shops, payday lenders, and charity shops would be in winter. As he was driving into town a series of signs directed him toward the Winter Park that Wikipedia told him had been erected on the site of one of the former mines. It was an artificial ski slope and he snorted at the picture of it, in form as close to a literal White Elephant as it was possible to imagine. Of all the misconceived projects, wastes of taxpayer’s money he could imagine, this was surely at the top of the list. It was highly unlikely that any of Castleford’s denizens would be learning to ski in the near future, he suspected.
    He tweeted a few careful observations about the dilapidation around him, keen not to bring any accusations of snobbery or condescension down on his head, his phone discreetly nestled in his left hand. Almost instantly he had a tweet back from Jaqui.
    You in the North. Unbeleevb. What’s next @Dominicator in Wales? #radicalnorth
    He