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for us counts as time on duty,’ I tell her. ‘Do you really want someone who’s been awake too long to fly you home?’
    ‘I don’t care who flies me home, long as someone does,’ Lauren says shakily into her phone. ‘Lisa, I swear, I’m going crazy here. I’m panicking. I need to get home. What? Yeah, course I will.’ She clutches my arm. ‘Lisa says I have to stick with you.’
    Thanks, Lisa.
    ‘What? No, I can’t. Oh, Lisa, don’t ask me that – if I told you, it’d do your head in. It’s doing my fucking head in. Jason thinks I’m at Mum’s. No, he doesn’t know I’m in Germany. Don’t tell Dad, will you? He’d only worry – he’s as bad as Jason. What? No, I told Jason I’d be back by half eleven, quarter to twelve. He’s going to go mad when I’m not back by then. What am I going to do? I’m on a coach being carted off somewhere, I don’t even know where . . .’ She starts to cry again. ‘What? Yeah, all right. Yeah, I will. Just . . . don’t say anything to Dad, will you? Cheers, Lisa.’
    No! No! Don’t go, Lisa!
    ‘I have to try to keep calm,’ Lauren tells me, wiping her eyes. ‘Easy for her to say. I’m not good at being calm. Especially when I don’t know where I’m going, or how I’ll ever get home, if I ever will. It’s lucky you’re looking after me. If I was on my own, I’d go apeshit.’
    Tell her. Tell her, now, that you’re not looking after her, that you never agreed to do anything of the sort.
    ‘I’m stressed, that’s what it is,’ she says. ‘This is what I get like. Jason’s not frightened of anything, he never panics, but me? I lose it when I get stressed, big time.’
    I push away a barrage of self-pitying thoughts along the lines of ‘When do I get to cry and physically assault strangers?’ and ‘Why can’t I be looked after?’ Ten more minutes of Jason-this-but-I-that might actually make my head explode. I’ve already heard that Jason doesn’t mind rain and snow, but Lauren hates both; Jason can sleep brilliantly on coaches, but Lauren can’t; Jason’s good at planning whereas Lauren can’t think more than two minutes ahead; Jason knows what to do in a crisis and Lauren doesn’t.
    And I’ve missed another opportunity: failed for the third time to ask her to leave me alone, to make it clear that I’m not responsible for her. I should have done it when she fell into my arms sobbing, but I didn’t. I should have done it when she rang Lisa the first time, as the coach set off from Dusseldorf airport, and told her she’d made a new friend: a nice middle-aged lady called Gaby who was looking after her. I didn’t.
    Is Jason intelligent enough to realise that if you describe a thirty-eight-year-old woman as middle-aged, she’s more likely to want to kill you than help you? Because Lauren isn’t.
    ‘What am I going to do?’ she asks me.
    There’s a book in my bag that has magic powers: at least three hundred pages I haven’t yet read, and the ability to make this all-night coach ordeal bearable. What’s stopping me from getting it out and opening it? Is it my reluctance to discover what ‘apeshit’ means to somebody whose idea of normal involves wailing in public? If I make the decision to disappoint Lauren, I’ll have to suffer the consequences for God knows how long. There can be no getting away from her until we land in Combingham.
    Or do I want her to carry on burdening me with her problems so that she’ll owe me – so that I won’t feel rude when I ask again about the innocent man who’s going to prison for murder? I’ve already asked about him once, at Dusseldorf airport. I asked as soon as I humanely could, after I’d disentangled myself from our awkward embrace and she’d pulled herself together a bit. She clammed up. ‘Nothing. Forget it,’ she said. So far, I haven’t been able to. Perhaps she’ll let her guard down and bring it up again if I encourage her to talk.
    ‘Jason doesn’t know you’re in