‘Who’s the criminal and who’s the victim?’ asked Ellie meaningfully.

‘Oh, Ellie, do shut up,’ said her mother.

A nervous-looking young woman in her late twenties was shown into the room. She was wearing a Kurt Cobain sweatshirt and lots of black eye make-up and if she wasn’t Ellie’s older sister, genetic scientists would want to know why not.

‘This is Ruth, who owns the shop. This is the young lady who broke your window,’ said the policewoman. Ellie looked at the shop owner, bewildered.

‘Did they tell you to do that?’

‘What?’

‘Look like me.’

‘Do I look like you?’

Everyone in the room, including the police officers, laughed.

‘You put that picture in the window to exploit people,’ said Ellie, with noticeably less confidence than she had been exhibiting previously.

‘Which picture? The picture of Kurt? That’s always been there. I’m his biggest fan. His biggest fan in Hertfordshire, anyway.’

‘You didn’t just stick it in today to make some money?’

‘Make some money out of all the grieving Nirvana fans in Royston, you mean? That would only work if it was a picture of Julio Iglesias.’

Ellie looked embarrassed.

‘Is that why you broke the window?’ Ruth asked. ‘Because you thought I was exploiting people?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Today has been the saddest day of my life. And then some little idiot comes up and breaks my window because she thinks I’m trying to rip people off. Just… grow up.’

Will doubted very much whether Ellie was lost for words too often, but it was clear that if you wished to reduce her to a gaping, red-faced mess, all you had to do was find a twenty-something doppelgänger whose commitment to Kurt Cobain was even more devout than her own.

‘I’m sorry,’ she whispered.

‘Yeah, well,’ said Ruth. ‘Come here.’ And while the assembled and for the most part unsympathetic occupants of the police interview room watched, Ruth opened her arms, and Ellie stood up, walked over to her and hugged her.

It seemed to have escaped Fiona’s notice that this embrace should have marked the end of the whole sorry cardboard-cut-out affair, but then Will had been aware for some time that more or less everything had passed her by since they stopped for petrol. It soon became clear, however, that she had been steeling herself for action, rather than daydreaming, and for reasons best known to herself she had decided that the time for action was now. She stood up, walked around the table, put her arms around Marcus from behind and, with an embarrassingly emotional intensity, addressed the policewoman who had been looking after them.

‘I haven’t been a good mother to him,’ she declared. ‘I’ve let things slide, and I haven’t been noticing properly, and… I’m not surprised things have come to this.’

‘They haven’t come to anything, Mum,’ said Marcus. ‘How many more times? I haven’t done anything.’ Fiona ignored him; she didn’t seem even to have heard.

‘I know I don’t deserve a chance, but I’m asking for one now, and… I don’t know whether you’re a mother or not?’

‘Me?’ asked the policewoman. ‘Yeah. I’ve got a little boy. Jack.’

‘I’m appealing to you as a mother… If you give us another chance, you won’t regret it.’

‘We don’t need a chance, Mum. I haven’t done anything wrong. I only got off a train.’

Still no reaction. Will had to hand it to her: once she had decided to fight for her child she was unstoppable, however wrong-headed the decision, and however inappropriate the weapons. What she was saying was barmy—she might even have been aware that it was barmy—but at least it was coming from a part of her that knew she had to do something for her son. It was a turning point, of sorts. You could imagine this woman saying all kinds of inappropriate things at peculiar times; but it was getting much harder to imagine finding her sprawled off a sofa covered in sick, and Will was beginning to learn that sometimes good news came in unpromising shapes and sizes.

‘We’re willing to cut a deal,’ said Fiona. Was Royston law the same as LA Law? Will wondered. It seemed unlikely, but one never knew. ‘Marcus will testify against Ellie, if you let him go. I’m sorry, Katrina, but it’s too late for her. Let Marcus start again with a clean sheet.’ She buried her face in the back of Marcus’s neck, but Marcus shook her off and moved away from her and towards Will. Katrina, who had spent much of Fiona’s speech trying not to laugh, went over to comfort her.

‘Shut up, Mum. You’re mad. Bloody hell, I can’t believe how crap my parents are,’ said Marcus with real feeling.

Will looked at this strange little group, his gang for the day, and tried to make some sense of it. All these ripples and connections! He couldn’t get his head round them. He was not a man given to mystical moments, even under the influence of narcotics, but he was very worried that he was having one now, for some reason: maybe it was something to do with Marcus walking away from his mother and over to him? Whatever the explanation, it was making him feel very peculiar. Some of these people he hadn’t known until today; some of them he had only known for a little while, and even then he couldn’t say that he knew them well. But here they were anyway, one of them clutching a cardboard cut-out Kurt Cobain, one of them in a plaster cast, one of them crying, all of them bound to each other in ways that it would be almost impossible to explain to anyone who had just wandered in. Will couldn’t recall ever having been caught up in this sort of messy, sprawling, chaotic web before; it was almost as if he had been given a glimpse of what it was like to be human. It wasn’t too bad, really; he wouldn’t even mind being human on a full-time basis.

They all went to the nearest burger bar for supper. Ruth and Ellie sat apart and ate chips and smoked and whispered; Marcus and his relatives carried on the sniping they had embarked on with such enthusiasm in the police station. Clive wanted Marcus to complete his journey to Cambridge, but Fiona felt he should return to London, while Marcus seemed too confused by his afternoon to feel anything very much.

‘Why was Ellie with you in the first place?’ Will asked him.

‘I can’t remember now,’ said Marcus. ‘She just wanted to come.’

‘Was she going to stay with us?’ asked Clive.

‘Dunno. S’pose so.’

‘Thanks for asking us first.’

‘Ellie’s not right for me,’ said Marcus firmly.

‘You’ve worked that out, have you?’ said Will.

‘I’m not sure who she is right for,’ said Katrina.

‘I think we’ll always be friends,’ Marcus continued. ‘But I don’t know. I think I ought to look for someone less—’

‘Less rude and mad? Less violent? Less bloody stupid? There are any number of lesses I can think of.’ This contribution was from Ellie’s mother.

‘Less different from me,’ said Marcus diplomatically.

‘Well, good luck,’ said Katrina. ‘There are a lot of us who’ve spent half our lives looking for someone less different from us, and we haven’t found them so far.’

‘Is it that hard?’ asked Marcus.

‘It’s the hardest thing in the world,’ said Fiona, with more feeling than Will wanted to contemplate.

‘Why do you think we’re all single?’ said Katrina.

Was that really it? Will wondered. Was that what they were all doing, looking for someone less different? Was that what he was doing? Rachel was dynamic and thoughtful and focused and caring and different in more ways than he could count, but the whole point of Rachel, as far as Will was concerned, was that she wasn’t him. There was a flaw in Katrina’s logic, then. This thing about looking for someone less different… It only really worked, he realized, if you were convinced that being you wasn’t so bad in the first place.