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reason,’ Charlie told her.
    ‘Not unless anything,’ said Simon. ‘I don’t know you.’
    Listen to us
, Charlie thought.
Host and hostess of the year.
This was what happened when you dealt with dangerous, untrustworthy people every day of your working life.
    ‘You do know me,’ Regan Murray protested, pushing the door open as Simon tried to close it. ‘Or, rather, you’d know my name – what my name used to be. Murray’s my husband’s name, which I took when we got married, and Regan . . . it wasn’t the name I was born with. If you’ll let me in, I’ll explain.’
    ‘It might have to work the other way round,’ said Charlie. ‘You’ve got about ten seconds.’
    The woman shielded her eyes from the rain with her hand, so that she could get a better look at Simon as she spoke to him. ‘Fair enough,’ she said. ‘I’m Amanda Proust. Your boss’s daughter.’

3
Thursday 10 March 2011
    ‘Lisa? It’s me. You’re not going to fucking believe this. Guess where I am now? On another fucking coach. Yeah. Yeah, that’s right. All of us, on coaches taking us
away
from Cologne airport, when we’ve just spent two fucking hours getting there. They’ve said the crew that’s supposed to be flying us home have gone past their limit, or something. What? Dunno. Everyone’s saying we’re off to a hotel, but no one really knows anything. No, I dunno. I’ll ask Gaby. Lisa says, is there anyone on here from the airline who might know what’s going on?’
    ‘No one,’ I say. ‘Just us and the driver. Who speaks no English.’ No point in shielding Lisa from the awful truth. When we boarded this coach for the first time, outside Dusseldorf airport, I assumed Bodo Neudorf would be coming with us. He seemed to be very much one of the gang at that point: helping elderly passengers and children up the steps, leaning in and counting us all every so often, as if the trip to Cologne airport was his own personal project. I assumed he would wish to oversee it from start to finish, but apparently not. When the door finally slid shut he was on the wrong side of it, having delegated the job of being our reassuring Fly4You liaison guy to nobody.
    I turned and watched his lean, straight-backed figure shrink into the distance as we drove away, and was struck by the deceptiveness of appearances. It looked as if we had abandoned him, but he would be fine; we, on the other hand, were alone, all two hundred of us – alone in a hollow, uncontoured way that felt endless, a way that someone like Sean wouldn’t be able to imagine and has certainly never experienced. No one has, unless they’re a regular air traveller. Or perhaps severely depressed, or terminally ill and on the brink of death. There is nothing more isolating than hurtling through a stormy German night with a random collection of anxious strangers, all chasing the rumour of a plane.
    ‘Lisa says, how can the crew have gone past their flying limit when they’ve been sitting on their arses necking cups of tea and waiting for us all night? She says it’s not like they’ve been flying anyone else around to kill time, is it? Someone’s been lying to us!’
    Lisa: thirty-three-year-old nail technician with two toddlers from a previous relationship, now married to Wayne Cuffley and stepmother to twenty-three-year-old Lauren Cookson, who looks much younger than she is, and whom I am currently sitting next to. I’m on her Jason side, not her Father side. The Jason tattoo is even bigger, with red hearts on green stalks inside the holes of the ‘a’ and the ‘o’. Jason is Lauren’s caretaker-cum-gardener-cum-handyman husband. He has done the Iron Man Challenge three times.
    It would be hard to overstate how much I have learned about Lauren and her family in the past two hours – more than I would have thought possible. All she knows about me is the one detail I have volunteered: that my name is Gaby.
    ‘The time they spend hanging around Cologne airport waiting