"Yes. But you're okay now. Just keep quiet."

I looked at Chandler. "What happened?"

"Someone crashed into your car in Grosvenor Road near Dolphin Square, and wrote it off."

I tried to get him in focus. They'd been plugging me with drugs, by the feel of things. "Was I driving?" It sounded an odd question. The thing was, I couldn't remember anything.

"Yes. But someone got an ambulance in time." He watched me with his bright black-eyed stare.

The room seemed to have gone very still; the nurse wasn't moving, nor was Chandler; he sat with his feet together and his pale hands on his knees, his face held slightly upwards with its thin hooked nose sniffing the air. I looked away from him, wanting to think. So there was a memory gap of some sort. The crash had been wiped out. The second crash. Sinclair's, then mine. They were very much in earnest.

"Who are they?" I asked him, and then remembered the nurse, and wasn't surprised when he didn't answer. He looked up at her instead.

"It's really quite urgent that I put a few questions," he said. "Quite urgent."

She went out and came back with a doctor, who looked at me for a long time and then looked at the chart. "Yes," he said, "it was mainly shock, plus two cracked ribs and one or two bruises and a bit of retrogressive amnesia."' The nurse must have told him I'd been asking Chandler what had happened.

The doctor was watching me critically. "What can you last remember?"

I shied from making the effort; it was like having to go back into a distant country where everyone was a stranger. "I remember some people," I said. "Some people walking on the embankment, by the river. And a man — " but I broke off.

A man floating on his back, staring up at me with his dead blue eyes. But that had been before, beyond some kind of time shift. That had been Sinclair. "Some people," I said, "and a blue light."