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considering whether to wake him, when a decision was made redundant. He cried out a name and sat upright, eyes open wide and staring into the flames.
    I sat down, embarrassed as he noticed my presence. The name he had shouted aloud had been Sabine’s.
    “It was a terrible shock,” I said.
    He knew what I meant. He nodded.
    I looked at him. “What happened?”
    We had not spoken of it at the time. Beauregard had quit university not long after, without so much as a farewell. One day his rucksack had been on the chair in the lounge we shared, and the next it was gone.
    “I showed her something,” he said, and those four words, almost inaudible in his tobacco-wrecked voice, sent a cold shiver down my spine.
    “Showed her something...?” My tone communicated my incomprehension.
    He nodded. “You know in any relationship, if it means anything, there has to be a trading of truths.” He looked up at me.
    I felt myself colouring. He asked, “Do you have anyone, Simon?”
    I shook my head. “No... Not at the moment.”
    He nodded again. Something in his eyes told me that he understood.
    “Well... Sabine meant a lot to me. We were one person. I had to show her what I understood... I showed her that, my reality, and she couldn’t take it. She ran. I searched the city. I was worried about what she might do – I knew it had been too much. I think I knew, before the police arrived, what had happened. I woke at midnight with a terrible sense of presentiment. I knew what she had done.” He shrugged, almost casually, and lit another emaciated cigarette with shaking fingers.
    I tried to say something, but my throat was too dry. At last I managed, “What did you show her?”
    He looked at me for a long time. “I don’t think I could explain now, and anyway you wouldn’t understand.”
    I was about to press him, accuse him of patronising me, and ask him again what he had done to drive Sabine to kill herself – but at that second the phone rang, startling me.
    It was a friend from the village, asking if I fancied a pint at the Fleece. The thought of a change of venue, of the chance to escape from Beauregard, was a life-belt thrown to a drowning man.
    I replaced the receiver and explained that I had arranged to meet someone. “You could always come along,” I said, knowing full well that he would excuse himself and remain in the house.
    “Then I’ll show you to your room,” I said, but he gestured to the sofa.
    “Simon, I’ll be fine here. I’ll see you in the morning.”
    I nodded, feeling obscurely guilty as I pulled on my coat and said goodbye. The look in his eyes, as he watched me go, told me that he understood my need to get away.
    Only as I pushed into the glowing, welcome fug of the tap room did I recall something Beauregard had told me, over twenty years ago: in a rash moment of drunken bonhomie he had said that all his life people had wanted to get away from him, though what had struck me as tragic about this revelation was his admission that he understood their reasons.
    For the next couple of hours, with the help of the Tuesday night crowd and five pints of Taylor’s, I tried to forget Beauregard, and the fact that he was resident in my study for an indefinite period. The effort was too much: from time to time my thoughts would stray. I attempted to recall how long he had stayed the last time, ten years ago. It might only have been a day, though in retrospect it seemed longer.
    It was midnight when I made my way back through the snow and let myself into the fire-lit warmth of the house. I looked in on Beauregard in the study.
    He was sleeping soundly on the sofa, still wrapped in his greatcoat, illuminated by the orange light of the standard lamp.
    I was about to close the door when I noticed the paperback, open and lying face down on the carpet before the sofa. It was a copy of my second book, published almost fifteen years ago – a collection of crime stories which I considered my best work. Something