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so took the exit west. This was the exit Caroline Daniels would have used; it was the one Zoë used once she’d lit a cigarette; once the train had pulled out of the station, abandoning her along with a few stragglers waiting for another train . . . An air of fatigue hung over the evening, as if everybody involved in it had had enough; as if nobody, the weather included, could be bothered to finish what they’d started.
    Smoke caught the back of her throat in a way that didn’t often happen; she had to lean against a wall as the fit passed. Bloody damn , she thought, when she could think, instead of cough. She must look like a derelict; as if she’d been sucking on a roll-up made from other people’s throwaways. She tossed it while she could still breathe, and it bounced, scattering sparks into the path of a cyclist, who gave her a look . . . She was past caring; visions of sterile white rooms were swimming into view again: We’ll have to fix you up with an appointment . . . She put one hand to her heart, but it felt normal.
    Whatever that is.
    . . . Panics came in different colours, but Zoë’s were always white. This white panic began with a lump in the breast. If anyone else had access to it, she thought she’d have to kill them . . . Because this was a vulnerability beyond sex, beyond her deepest, private thoughts; it made gynaecology look like amateur fumbling. She was not frightened of death, nor even of the different forms death took. She was frightened, though, of the pity of strangers; disgusted, too, at the weakness of a body that threw up unexpected lumps; that held for years, getting its owner from place to place, doing everything expected of it; producing pleasure and pain in more or less equal doses, attracting the admiration of lovers and strangers, and then coming up with a life-fucker like this . . . They talk about nursing a traitor to your bosom, but when your bosom itself turned traitor, language ran dry. Zoë wasn’t the first woman this had happened to, and wouldn’t be the last. But it was the first time it had happened to her.
    All of this rushing out of her, as if the day’s mantra, we’ll have to fix you up with an appointment , had rattled it loose at last; the storm generated by a doctor’s words, or not even by the words so much as the knowledge the words were coming – the knowledge that had fastened deep the morning three mornings ago she’d found the lump. We’ll have to fix you up with an appointment. Like one of those magic formulae, like open sesame , it took you into a world of wonder, except the wonder wasn’t what you wanted it to be; was more like everything you didn’t. She felt almost nothing, she remembered. She was rarely happy. She was rarely sad. She felt almost nothing. But that seemed to be coming to an end, and what she felt that moment was a massive, yawning nostalgia for the emptiness she’d been numbed by these few years; that, and a blinding horror of the intrusions ahead. Unless it was a false alarm, she told herself. This was always the standby of fools and cowards – it could easily be a false alarm.
    She waited, then, until it passed, which it did. This was what she relied on: the permanence of what lay beneath; the rock-solid knowledge of who she was, had always been. This was what would carry her through. Meanwhile, there was work to do. She took a deep breath – didn’t light a cigarette – and set off for Caroline Daniels’ house.

Chapter Two
    Other people’s accidents
    i
    This was neither far nor hard to locate. She was still in earshot of the railway when she found herself beneath a streetlight that didn’t work, looking at a narrow two-storey house on a quiet road leading to a park; a house with a minimal patch of front yard, which contained nothing. This was where Caroline Daniels’ workday ended and her private life began, and having arrived, Zoë felt dead-ended. There was little more she could do tonight, bar head for home and hit