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And a handprint over the rear wing. Not mine. Level with the back wheel I drop my sandwich on the floor. When I squat to pick it up, I reach under the arch. I move quickly, dust off the sandwich.

Back inside the car I start the engine. What was fastened above the wheel is in my pocket. Once I’m accelerating up the slip road on to the motorway, I take it between my thumb and forefinger to inspect. A transponder, a tracker, a device beaming my location from satellite to the screen of whoever placed it there, whoever is following.

The harder the rain hammers at the windscreen, the faster I drive. Into fifth now, a firmer grip on the steering wheel. If they want sport, they can have it. The rain streaks the windscreen, I weave back and forth from inside to outside lane, overtaking at 130 mph, 140 mph.

I cut three lanes to take the exit at junction 16. Horns blare. Coming off the slip road I feel like a pilot touching down on a runway. About five miles along the A road towards Bedford, I take a right, on to a narrow lane cutting between fields dotted with sheep, huddled close against the rain.

I’ve been here before, this stretch of desolate road. Last time in an orange Metro, my hand clutched on a knife. If I’d reached across and stabbed the teacher, I wouldn’t be here right now, alone on an empty road, following a ghost, followed by a ghost. But then we can speculate on a million twists and turns of every day, what could and would happen if this and that did. Or didn’t.

Outside the entrance to the field I’d woken in that morning all those years ago, I pull up, leaving the engine running as I jump out and open the metal gate. The track down to the derelict signal house is cratered with deep puddles. A pile of hardcore has been dumped, ready to fill the holes. I weave around the rubble, drive over the grass and through the large wooden doors, propped open by bricks.

Since I slept here, kept from the cold by a stolen coat, the roof has been covered by sheet tarpaulin, flapping wildly in the wind. What was an earthen floor is now covered in straw. Plastic barrels of fertiliser stand in the corner.

I switch off the engine, pick up the tracker and get out. I crouch again by the rear arch of the wheel and reattach it to the underside. Then I open the boot, take out a ski jacket, woolly hat, and a pair of handcuffs.

Before stepping out into the cold, February rain, I scan the lane for other cars. Nothing. An empty field in an empty world. Not even a bird. I zip up the jacket and pull on the hat. I shut the wooden doors and walk back to the edge of the field, where the access track runs parallel to the hedgerow, stepping not on the mud, but the thick green grass. Tyre tracks in, but no prints out.

Then I slide beneath the barbed wire and the hedgerow, slip into the freezing water of the ditch.

Twenty years ago I crouched in a ditch of freezing water to hide. Did someone say you can never step into the same river twice? I don’t believe them. What has happened in two decades suddenly means nothing. I’m still a motherless child a long way from home, in fear of being found.

An engine, the gate opening. When the wheels squelch past my hiding place, I lower my body deeper into the icy water. A black Range Rover brakes before the pile of hardcore. I can only make out the profile of a man in the driving seat, alone. He cuts the engine and sits. For five minutes he’s just a silhouette. Finally I see him moving, checking something in his hand. Then the door opens. I’ve never seen him before. He’s as tall as me but heavier in the shoulders. He has short, black, cropped hair, a broad forehead, and a thick black moustache. I see this when he turns back to look at the open gate.

And I see a handgun, lengthened by a silencer, pressed against his thigh.

He wastes no time staking out the building. He pulls open the wooden doors and storms inside, gun drawn. I scramble up from the ditch and run, ducking behind the cover of his car. I run stooped, like