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playing on his phone as Jim talked - the empty house and Jim’s missing daughter and the smear of blood tumbling from Jim’s lips - was perhaps a bad idea. He leaned back, pushed himself upright, nodding now, like he had been listening all along. Like he hadn’t missed it.
    “Tell me more about the blood.”

Chapter 7
    Tom - Thursday, 15th March – 8.45pm
    They flocked together, sheep in a pen, the artificially warm hospital air alive with panicked bleats. Pawing at one another, each one more fearful than the next. Waiting.
    “I’m so sorry, look, I know you are worried, and this is so awful, but if you could be patient…” Singsong voice almost lost in the sea of sound. The receptionist leaned across the desk, hands narrow with black painted nails. She looked too young to be dealing with all this grief.
    The man was elderly, although perhaps older now than he had been that morning. He clung to the desk edge. Tom watched him as he swayed.
    “Look love, I know it’s not down to you. But it’s our daughter. She’s…our only little girl. Just look on your computer there…look…you must have something. Please. There must be something…”
    He was crying. Tom couldn’t see his face, just the back of his greying head. But his voice was thick with tears. Tom found himself looking down at his own hands. They were broad, nails bitten to the quick, the platinum wedding ring scarred and scratched. They were steady.
    “I’m sorry.”
    Tom had been only dimly aware of the drive: houses flashing past, the bright glowing lights of Swansea central police station, Dan jumping from the car almost before it had stopped. Shouting to him to wait, do not move. Pulling the handcuffed man – was there a prisoner? He seemed to remember that there had been – from the back seat. And Tom sitting there and sitting there and knowing that it was finally over. Then Dan flying out of the station again, alone this time, jumping into the driver’s seat, not a word, and then they’re flying, screeching out into honking traffic.
    Winding on lean roads beneath steep mountains, through the villages that got more and more tired. Drained of coal, drained of life. The sleeping giant stretched across the Cribarth ridges, bathed in snow. His father had always pointed, directing his son’s gaze towards the mountain top. See that? People say that he’ll wake up one day, when people need him most. He never had though, no matter how much Tom had needed him. He stared at the mountains, half-expecting to see colossal arms breaking free. But nothing, just dead rock and snow. They were fenced in, when you thought about it, ringed by precipitous heights so that no matter how high you flew, you still couldn’t escape. The shadows turned the snow grey, the gullies giving way to mountain streams frozen solid. Then the black expanse of reservoir. A stripped bare landscape, skeletal trees, nothing to hide behind.
    Then there was the smoke, the reddened glow of fire. The tiny village of Talgarth, narrow streets choked with police cars, fire engines. Knots of people, wrapped in inappropriate clothes, staring up towards the flames. The air hummed with sirens. Ambulances, laid out like bishops in chess, waiting for the right time. Because surely someone will have survived.
    The car stopped, pulled up short by police cordons, and Tom was out of the door, running. Ducking under the narrow tape that twisted in the breeze. Cold air replaced by heat, the crackle of flames. ‘Keep Out’ signs screaming at the throng of people that pumped in to the abandoned lunatic asylum. This was where the plane had hit, although there was little evidence left that there had ever been a plane. Apart from the destruction. The main building of the asylum now a blazing pile of bricks and glass and metal. Wooden joists and the boards that had once tried in vain to keep the curious out now kindling for fire, clock tower supine on the weed infested drive. Fire destroying what madness