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noticed the expression on Toby’s face. It had been hard for Nicholas to place; he’d never seen anyone regard him that way before: it looked a little like confusion, a bit like scepticism, somewhat like anxiety . . . and yet it was something completely different, something solid and primal. Then he placed it. It was fear. Toby was afraid of him. The chat ended there. Very soon after, Toby began avoiding him on the shop floor and stopped returning his calls.
    Nicholas finally found the courage to make an appointment to see a psychologist. He told the bird-fingered, beak-nosed doctor about Cate’s death, about the headaches, the fall on the stairs and the haunted places. She nodded, took notes. He told her that other people thought he was a bit crazy, but he wasn’t. From the small amount of research he’d done, the ghosts he saw correlated with records of deaths. The ghosts were real .
    She nodded some more, and looked up from her notes. ‘Do you think you’re unwell?’
    The question irritated him.
    ‘I’m seeing the dead. It certainly doesn’t feel fucking healthy.’
    She nodded again and propped her head on an avian fist.
    ‘Do you miss your wife?’
    Nicholas hesitated. Was that a trick question? ‘Yes.’
    She pursed her thin lips. ‘And do you think you could be inventing these “ghosts” in the hope that you might, at least for yourself, bring your wife back?’
    The question struck like a cricket bat.
    He’d been seeing strangers’ ghosts for nearly a month, but had never thought about the possibility of seeing Cate again.
    He hurried home to Greenford, heart racing, and grabbed the spare key for the as yet unsold Ealing flat.
    The sun had dropped below the city’s grey skyline when he hurried past the ‘For Sale’ sign around to the back of the complex (he studiously avoided the front stairs) and up the rear stairwell to their little place. The flat was clean and empty as a robbed tomb. His heart was throbbing in his chest so hard that his fingers shook. He strode through the echoing kitchen, past the still lounge room, to the bathroom. It was clean now - the long line through the dust where Cate’s heel had slid as her neck swung down on its fatal parabola to the bath edge was long gone, the plaster dust all swept away. The shower curtain that had popped from the rail as she’d fruitlessly grabbed to save herself had been replaced. The ceiling remained unpainted.
    And she was there.
    Straining high on an invisible ladder.
    ‘Cate?’
    She turned at the sound of his voice. Put one foot down to a step in the air, another . . . then one foot slipped and kicked out from under her. One plaster-dusted hand struck out, grabbing at empty space. The other closed around a shower curtain that wouldn’t hold her. She fell. Her mouth opened in a small ‘O’ of surprise. One heel hit the floor, and slid out - much as his own must have done finding the Boots bag - and she arced backwards. Nicholas dived to catch her, and his fingers smacked painfully into the tiles. Right under his face, her neck struck the hard, tooth-white edge of the bath and her hair tossed backwards. The goggles wrenched off. And her eyes stared up at nothing, dusting white under a phantom mist of powder. Her chest deflated slowly and didn’t rise again.
    Nicholas felt his throat twist and tighten. His wide eyes stung.
    She looked so small. This was how he had found her the afternoon of the crash: sprawled as if exhausted, painfully arched, eyes open to nothing.
    Then her eyes rolled towards his. Just for a moment. It was a look that could mean a million things or nothing. A look as empty as a dusty glass found forgotten on a window sill. Then she was back up the invisible ladder, floating, sanding, about to die again, and again, and again.
    Nicholas stayed until midnight, watching her fall and die, until his eyes were so red and his throat so wretched he could hardly see or breathe. He willed his heart to burst and fail, but it