Ellie’s mum was an attractive woman in her early forties, youthful-looking enough to get away with the tatty, faded blue jeans and leather biker jacket she was wearing. She had a shock of curly hennaed hair and nice crinkles around her eyes and mouth, and she seemed to have given up on her daughter a long time ago.

‘She’s mad,’ Katrina said with a shrug as soon as she got into the car. ‘I don’t know how or why, but she is. Not mad mad, but, you know. Out of control. Do you mind if I smoke, if I open the window?’ She fiddled around in her bag, failed to find her lighter, and then forgot about smoking altogether. ‘It’s funny, because when Ellie was born I really hoped she’d turn out like this, feisty and rebellious and loud and bright. That’s why I called her Eleanor Toyah.’

‘Is that something classical?’ Fiona asked.

‘No, it’s pop,’ said Will. Fiona laughed, although Will couldn’t see why.

‘Toyah Wilcox.’

‘And now it’s happened, and she is feisty and rebellious and what have you, I’d give anything for her to be mousy and home every night. She’s killing me.’

Will winced at Katrina’s turn of phrase, and glanced at Fiona alongside him, but she gave no indication of being aware that the expression had anything but a figurative meaning.

‘This is the last straw, though,’ Katrina said.

‘Ditto,’ said Fiona.

‘Until the next last straw, anyway.’

They both laughed, but it was true, Will thought. There would always be one more last straw. Ellie was killing Katrina, and Marcus was killing Fiona, and they would go on killing them for years and years. They were the Undead. They couldn’t live, not properly, and they couldn’t die; all they could do was sit in a stranger’s car and laugh about it. And people like Jessica had the nerve to tell him that he was missing out? He didn’t think he’d ever understand what that was supposed to mean.

They stopped to get petrol, cans of drink, crisps and chocolate bars, and when they got back into the car the atmosphere between them had changed: somewhere among the popping cans and the rustling crisp packets they seemed to have become a trio. It was almost as if they had forgotten why they were travelling in the first place; the journey had become the point of the trip. Will remembered from school coach trips that it was something to do with getting out and getting back in again, although he wasn’t sure exactly what. Perhaps you didn’t notice that you had created a feeling until you left it and went back to it, but there was a feeling now—a heady mix of despair, shared concern, suppressed hysteria, and straightforward team spirit—and Will could feel that he was inside it, rather than looking at it through a window. This couldn’t possibly be what he was missing out on, because he wasn’t missing out, but it still involved kids. You had to hand it to Marcus, he thought: the boy was awkward and weird and the rest of it, but he had this knack of creating bridges wherever he went, and very few adults could do that. Will would never have imagined that he would have been able to walk across to Fiona, but he could now; his relationship with Rachel had been entirely underpinned by Marcus. And here was a third person, someone he had never met before tonight, and they were swapping fingers of Kit-Kat and swigs of Diet Lilt as if they had already exchanged bodily fluids. It was kind of ironic that this strange and lonely child could somehow make all these connections, and yet remain so unconnected himself.

‘Why did that guy shoot himself?’ Fiona suddenly asked.

‘Kurt Cobain?’ said Will and Katrina together.

‘If that was his name.’

‘He was unhappy, I suppose,’ said Katrina.

‘Well, I gathered that much. What about?’

‘Oh, I can’t remember now. Ellie did tell me, but I switched off after a while. Drugs? A bad childhood? Pressure? That sort of thing, anyway.’

‘I’d never heard of him before Christmas,’ said Fiona, ‘but he was quite a big deal, wasn’t he?’

‘Did you see the news tonight? There were all these heartbroken young people hugging each other and crying. It was very sad to watch. None of them seemed to be trying to break shop windows, though. Only my daughter wanted to express her grief like that, apparently.’

Will wondered whether Marcus had ever sat in his room listening to Nevermind in the same way that Will had sat in his room listening to the first Clash album. He couldn’t imagine that he had. Marcus couldn’t possibly have understood that kind of rage and pain, even though he probably had his own version of those feelings swilling around in there somewhere. And yet here he was, banged up in jail—well, sitting in a police station waiting room—because he had been accomplice to a crime that was somehow meant to avenge Kurt Cobain’s death. It was hard to imagine two less kindred spirits than Marcus and Kurt Cobain, and yet they had both managed to pull off the same trick: Marcus forced unlikely connections in cars and police stations and Kurt Cobain did the same thing on international television. It was proof that things weren’t as bad as they thought they were. Will wished he was able to show this proof to Marcus, and to anybody else who might be in need of it.

They were nearly there now. Katrina was still chatting away, apparently completely reconciled to the idea that her daughter was in trouble again (the only route open to you, Will presumed, if you had the misfortune to have Ellie as a daughter), but Fiona had gone terribly quiet.

‘He’ll be OK, you know,’ he said to her.

‘I know he will,’ she said, but there was something in her voice that he didn’t like.

Will was not surprised to find that the vibes in the police station were bad—like most habitual users of soft drugs he was no fan of the police—but he was surprised to find these vibes were coming not from the front desk, where they encountered only a slightly strained civility, but from the interview room, where there was a frosty silence and a lot of angry glares. Lindsey and Clive were glaring angrily at Marcus, who was glaring angrily at the wall. A furious teenage girl (who looked, Will was gratified to see, not unlike a cross between Siouxsie and Roadrunner, except with the haircut of someone who had recently been released into the community) was glaring angrily at anyone brave enough to catch her eye.

‘You took your time,’ said Ellie, when her mother walked in.

‘I took as long as it takes to make a phone call and drive here,’ said Katrina, ‘so don’t start.’

‘Your daughter,’ said Clive, with a pomposity that didn’t really suit a man wearing a University of Life sweatshirt and a plaster cast, ‘has been insulting and aggressive. And your son,’ he went on, nodding at Fiona, ‘has clearly been mixing with the wrong crowd.’

‘Your son,’ hooted Ellie, but Fiona was still grim and silent.

‘He told me to shut up,’ said Lindsey.

‘Diddums,’ said Ellie.

The policewoman who had shown them in was beginning to let her enjoyment of their disharmony show in her face. ‘Are we allowed to go?’ Will asked her.

‘Not yet. We’re waiting for the shop owner to come down.’

‘Good,’ said Ellie. ‘I want to give him a piece of my mind.’

‘It’s a her, actually,’ said the policewoman.

Ellie blushed. ‘Him or her, doesn’t matter. She’s sick.’

‘Why is she sick, Ellie?’ asked Katrina, in a tone which managed brilliantly to combine sarcasm and world-weariness, and which had clearly taken a very long time and a lot of practice to perfect.

‘Because she’s exploiting a tragic event for her own gain,’ said Ellie. ‘She has no idea what today means. She just thinks there’s a few quid in it.’

‘Why is she coming, anyway?’ Will asked the policewoman.

‘It’s something we’re trying here. You know, criminals face-to-face with victims of crime, so they get to see the consequences of their actions.’