One

'Sorry, Stan,' he murmured. He was crying now. The likelihood was that dragonflies would not come back. How could evolution go that way again? How could you fluke the weirdly beautiful twice in a row?

'I saw them,' he said.

'Quiet, Richard.' Was that Becky? He saw a figure hunched over fire, bringing a pan of water to the boil. 'You need to rest. Just take it easy.'

'But I saw them. Dragonflies.'

Sobbing. The boy. His boy. No, not Stanley. Aidan. Sobbing into his cupped hands. Taking peeks at Jane, then sobbing some more. Do I look that bad?

'We were fishing,' he said. 'Place called Tabley Mere. Knutsford. North west of England. Lovely place. Me. Dad. Grandad. Grandad . . . one of those people who don't have much time for little boys. Gruff. Sombre-looking. Bright blue eyes. Hair white. Hawkish. Sunken. He said maybe two dozen words to me before he died. I was thirteen by then. Miserable fucker, all things considered.

'I'd started to get into fishing. I was only six or seven. But I could set up a rig. I knew about baiting a swim. I knew the difference between a roach and a rudd. We didn't catch a thing. Dad and Grandad both fell asleep. I went for a walk, took my rod with me. Over a stile. Through a field to some trees. There was a gravel pit beneath them. I caught roach after roach, or maybe it was the same one. And then I realised I was being watched.

'It was like a window of stained glass had shattered into a thousand pieces and they were all hanging in the air behind me. It was a little scary, but I knew they couldn't sting me, they weren't like wasps. They didn't come near, as if they were attracted to you. They hung back. Hundreds of them. Maybe it was birthday for dragonflies, this particular day. You look at a dragonfly for a while, then everything else seems so dull afterwards.

'I wouldn't know how to tell him. I wouldn't know how to describe it to him. How do you describe a dragonfly to someone who hasn't seen one? You might as well be blind.'

Jane slept again, or fell unconscious. When he came to, he felt stiff, immobile. For terrifying seconds he thought he had been captured by his pursuers, ravened from the inside and left nailed to a post for the birds of his nightmares to tear strips from. But he was only lying on a blanket, his arms above his head – the way Stanley had slept as a baby – his midriff bandaged tightly, professionally. His head felt warm, treacly, his veins felt warm. He thought that if he closed his eyes he could visualise his entire circulatory system, map it in his head, every junction and branch and bend.

Gradually, the real world began to impinge. The wind skirled above their heads, cheated out of them by the high tops of lorries on either side. Their canvas skins thumped and fluttered and creaked. The woman and the child, the dead child in the shopping trolley, were gone.

Becky must have manhandled Jane into the barrow, got him across that macerated field and onto the road again. She was sitting by Aidan, stroking his hair, leaning over one arm, a blade of hair hiding her eyes from him. She looked spent.

Perhaps she sensed Jane's inspection, or heard the slightest shift of his arms as he repositioned himself; she looked up. Her eyes were red-rimmed, her skin sallow.

Aidan said, 'I want to go home.'

Jane resisted the urge: You are home.

'We've nothing to eat,' Becky said. 'And it's weird. It's not that I feel tired, I mean I do, I'm knackered. But it's just . . . there's nothing in the tank. I'm depressed just at the thought of having to lift that pack onto my shoulders again. And it's not as if it's all that heavy.'

Jane sat up. He felt light-headed, but otherwise OK. He felt guilty that he had rested while the others had not. But he would pay them back. There was no danger of that not happening. The pain drew his eyes closed, but he didn't cry out. The bandage seemed to muffle it somehow, that and whatever Becky had slipped into his arm while he was out of it.

'Lorazepam,' she admitted when he asked her. 'Just to take the edge off. You deserved it, after what happened.' 'How much have you got left?'

'A couple of ampoules. For special occasions.'

'It's good. It's very good.'

He felt honey-coated, bubble-wrapped. He looked around him at the cars and lorries, some super-magnified child's game in the moment of its abandonment. His head beat with the lack of sugar in his blood. But he tried to think. He'd seen something that teased him, like a scab not quite ripe for picking. He looked at Becky and Aidan. He looked at the lorries. The cars. A red car, maybe sixty yards down the road. Dented, windscreen cracked, layered with dust, but it had a sheen about it, an immaculateness that was missing in the others. Lady driver, he thought. Careful owner, full service history. He stood up, shakily.

'Richard,' Becky said, in that voice, that nurse's voice she had down pat.