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of consciousness. He feels a sudden stab of pain between his shoulder blades but it just stabs and goes.
    The dog is prancing on its toes, eager for something. Richard listens for noise in the building – nothing. The dog whines again. Richard puts his right hand on the arm of the chair, twists his weight over it and levers himself up. The dog dashes to the door, but Richard’s leg has fallen numb and buckles under him and he collapses back down into the chair.
    â€˜It’s all right, boy, I’m coming.’ He rubs the leg into life and heaves himself back up. The dog is already at the door and pawing at it. When Richard opens it the dog bounds towards the fire door leading to the stairs.
    â€˜Oh, bloody hell,’ says Richard but he follows and on the stairs he again leashes the dog with the dressing gown belt to keep it from barking and down the stairs they go and the dog leads him across the lobby to the kitchen and then through the kitchen to the outside door and Richard opens it and the dog bounds across the yard and by the wheel of a delivery truck the dog walks twice in a tight circle, then squats like a weightlifter and concentrates.
    Richard looks away out of engrained politeness. And to encourage the dog to relax and be thorough he makes a tour of the yard. There is little to see except the access lane leading towhat he thinks must be Manchester Street, where a row of little shops, a convenience store, an old-fashioned greengrocer’s, is fronted with a barricade of brick and rubble, all fallen from the Edwardian second storey. Richard is tempted to go for a closer look but even as he thinks of it a soldier ambles into view. Richard holds himself flat against the wall. The dog sees the soldier too. It stiffens and stares. It is about to bark.
    â€˜No, Friday, no.’
    The dog looks across at him. The soldier has been joined by another, both of them brown-skinned, looking barely out of their teens and cradling weapons as mothers cradle babies.
    â€˜Stay,’ whispers Richard to the dog. The soldiers look relaxed, do not seem to be expecting any action. Richard inches back along the wall. He is acutely aware of his fluffy slippers, his legs bare beneath the dressing gown. He reaches the end of the wall and turns into the yard and out of sight. He peers back around the corner. The soldiers are still there. The dog is looking his way.
    â€˜Here, Friday, come,’ and the dog bounds to him and jumps up at his chest and Richard staggers against the wall and all but falls. ‘Down, boy, down,’ hisses Richard and the dog lies immediately flat on the tarmac and looks up with a sort of Famous Five eagerness. Smiling, Richard leads the dog back inside. ‘Home,’ he says as he closes the heavy kitchen door behind them, and he goes to the fridge for a steak for the dog. ‘Home.’

Chapter 6
    It seemed to Annie that Terminal 3 had been designed to make leaving the country easier. The mean low ceilings. The overcrowding. The incessant overloud public address system. To work here would be a species of hell. Compare it with the airports of the tiger nations, the places that looked ahead rather than back – Singapore, Hong Kong, Dubai. Hugely spacious halls, the ceilings as high as the ceilings of medieval cathedrals.
    â€˜Shit, I hate Heathrow,’ said Paul, placing coffees on the too small cafeteria table which Annie had wiped with a paper serviette after shifting the mass of detritus left by previous customers. When Paul sat it seemed that the winsome little chair might buckle and splinter. Everything felt shoddy, gimcrack, tawdry.
    Paul had insisted on coming with her all the way across town on the Tube, on carrying her bag, even on queuing beside her to check in. ‘It’s Saturday,’ he said, when she said for the tenthtime she’d be fine. ‘What am I supposed to do? And besides, we live together, don’t we?’
    She looked up into his