Just a motorway exit, a railway station, a grimy, busy crossroads with traffic thundering through. Dirty great lorries and 4x4s and car after car after car. No one stopped. I waited at the traffic lights, looking down the curved slope of the high street. A greengrocer’s, an off-licence, a post office, a couple of charity shops, and three estate agents. I parked outside the train station. It was practically derelict. Dusty windows gave onto dim empty rooms. Rails curved off north and south towards their vanishing points. I carried a plastic bag of paperbacks, another of coat hangers, and one with her jumpers in it, lifted from the wardrobe, still just ever so faintly scented with her perfume. I phoned Mark as I walked up the street, all the bags clutched in one hand. The signal was fine. He spoke discreetly, in that at-work kind of way. I asked how Cate was doing; he said that she was fine. His mum was going to pick her up from the childminder, and he’d drop around to get her after work.
