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‘What are you doing today?' he asked her instead.

‘I'm going round to Bethany Thomson's to play bridge this afternoon. You can come if you like.'

‘No, I think I'll take a rain check. I don't know how to play bridge, and even if I do, I've forgotten. Bethany Thomson – is she Katie Thomson's mother? That girl who was here yesterday?'

‘That's right. Tragic, what happened to that family.'

‘Oh, yeah?'

‘There was a house fire. Apart from Katie, the Thomsons had twin boys, aged three. Both of them died from smoke inhalation.'

‘That's terrible. No wonder Katie's a little off the wall.'

‘She took a shine to you, though.'

‘That's me. Greg Merrick the Babe Magnet.'

Isobel touched his cheek and smiled. ‘It's good to see you relax. One day you'll realize that you don't have to keep on asking questions about the way things are.'

‘The day I do that, sweetheart, I'll be dead.'

Isobel's smile immediately faded. ‘Don't say that, Greg. Please.'

‘Why not? We all have to die someday. You know what I'm going to have engraved on my tombstone? “He Came. He Went.”'

‘Don't,' she insisted. ‘It isn't funny.'

‘I'm sorry,' he said, and put his arms around her, and gave her a hug. He kissed her earlobe and it was cold. He nearly whispered ‘I love you' in her ear to make her feel better, but he still couldn't bring himself to say it.

He had intended to face Catherine with a barrage of questions about the Trinity-Shasta Clinic, and about his treatment here. He had wanted to ask her why everybody that he had met here in the community felt so physically cold, and how they could appear to leave no footprints in the snow. He had also wanted to find out what was happening to Natasha Kerwin, and what ‘pull the plug' meant.

When he reached the clinic, however, he was told by the receptionist that Doctor Connor was away that morning, and that he would be treated instead by Doctor Do Shu-Ji.

He spent a dull and unproductive hour with Doctor Do, who mainly went over the questions that Catherine had asked him so many times before. What color was your mother's hair? What was your favorite toy when you were little? Who was your best friend at school? What sports did you enjoy the most?

Doctor Do was small and polite with a black pudding-bowl haircut and rimless spectacles. He spoke English with hardly any expression at all, so that it was sometimes difficult to know if he was asking a question or making a statement.

‘Your mother was good cook.'

‘Was she? I don't remember.'

‘No … I am asking
you
, Gregory-ssi. Your mother was good cook?'

‘Oh. In that case, I still don't remember.'

When he had finished, he went past the reception desk toward the corridor that led to Natasha Kerwin's room. The receptionist looked up from the magazine she was reading and said, ‘Help you, Mr Merrick?'

‘Just looking around, that's all.'

‘That corridor is off-limits, I'm afraid. Intensive care. That's where
you
were, when they first brought you in here, all smashed up.'

‘Oh. OK.'

Michael circled around the reception area for a while, but there was no real point in staying if Catherine was away and he couldn't get to see Natasha. Eventually he pushed out through the revolving door into the sunshine, and stood on the steps outside, tugging on his gloves. It may have been sunny outside, but the temperature was still minus five.

He was halfway down the steps when a clinic orderly in a green TSC jacket appeared around the left side of the building, pushing a wheelchair. Sitting in the wheelchair, all bundled up in a red plaid blanket, was Jack. He was wearing large movie-star sunglasses, but it was unmistakably him.

At the same time, in the parking lot, a large green Chevy Express panel van started up, and came creeping out to meet them. The van pulled up close to the clinic entrance, and then its driver climbed out to open up its back doors. He pressed a button to lower an elevator platform, and the orderly pushed Jack's wheelchair on to it, and locked it into place.

Michael stepped to one side, so that he was mostly concealed behind the bay tree at the right-hand side of the entrance. He didn't quite know why he felt the need to hide himself, but until he knew more about the Trinity-Shasta Clinic, and what had happened to Jack, he thought it would be wiser not to show how inquisitive he was. For all he knew, it might even be safer, too.

Jack's wheelchair was lifted into the back of the van, and the driver slammed the doors. Then the driver and the orderly walked around to the front of the van and climbed in. They drove out through the clinic gates, and turned left, toward Trinity, leaving behind them a sun-gilded ghost of exhaust smoke.

Michael hurried down the steps and followed them out on to the road. He was just in time to see them take the left fork that followed the clinic boundary wall, rather than the right fork which led back down to Isobel's house and the community center.

He started to walk after them, as fast as he could manage. Trinity was only a small community, after all, so they couldn't have gone very far. His leg muscles were aching after his love-making, and his sleepless night had left him feeling tired, but he needed to find out where they were taking Jack. The last time he had seen him, before he had gone into Natasha's room, Jack had seemed fine, both physically and mentally. How come he needed to be wrapped up in a blanket and wheeled around in a wheelchair, as if he were crippled?

The road curved around to the left until it reached the end of the clinic boundary, and then it curved to the right, and began to slope downhill. Here, there were houses on both sides of the road, most of them single-story, most of them with snow-covered vehicles parked outside. Again, there were hardly any tire tracks across the sidewalk, which indicated that their owners hardly ever went out – not since yesterday's snowfall, anyhow.

The TSC panel van was parked about seventy-five yards down the road, on the right-hand side, outside a yellow-painted two-story house with a gray stone porch. Its back doors were open, and Jack's wheelchair was being lowered on its elevator platform, although it looked as if the platform had jammed halfway down, because the van driver was banging at it with a wrench. As Michael came hobbling down the slope, he realized that he was very conspicuous in his long black overcoat against the snow, and especially since he was the only other person in the street. However, it appeared that the clinic orderly and the van driver were too preoccupied with unloading Jack's wheelchair to have noticed him. There was a leafless acer tree a few yards ahead of him, and he took four long steps and hid himself behind it.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree.
He just hoped that they wouldn't notice his vaporizing breath.

The van driver continued to bang at the elevator platform with his wrench, and the banging echoed across the cold and silent street. At last there was a whining noise, and the platform sank down to road level. The clinic orderly pushed Jack's wheelchair across the snowy sidewalk and up the driveway to the house.

As he did so, the front door opened and a woman came out. A tall, blonde woman in a dark blue sleeveless shift dress with a pale blue turtleneck sweater underneath. Michael recognized her instantly, even from this distance. It was his sister, Sue.

He stood stiffly behind the tree, with his back against the trunk, trying to breathe out through his nostrils so that he wouldn't produce so much tell-tale breath. What was Sue doing here, in a house in Trinity, when she was supposed to be living with her husband and her children in Oakland – the best part of three hundred miles away? And if she was only here on a visit, why hadn't she come to see him? Most baffling of all, why was she taking Jack into her house?

He had to wait for over ten minutes before the clinic orderly came back out of the house, and the van U-turned in the middle of the road and drove off back toward the clinic. He waited two or three minutes longer, and then he peeked around the side of the tree to make sure that there was nobody standing in front of the house, or looking out of any of the windows. Then he walked back uphill as quickly as he could.

It was clear to him now that he was being deceived by everybody in Trinity, both at the clinic and in the community. Maybe their intentions were good, but how could he be sure until he knew why they were lying to him? He was almost certain now that ‘Sue' wasn't his real sister at all – that's if he even had a sister. And that meant that all of the childhood photographs she had shown him must have been fake, and all of the stories that she had told him about his schooldays were invented.

More importantly, that suggested that the name ‘Gregory Merrick' was invented, too, and that he wasn't a marine engineer from San Francisco. Maybe he didn't even live in San Francisco. Maybe he was somebody else altogether – somebody who remembered Fonderlack Trail and feeling sad; somebody who knew all of the technical facts about soil erosion. Somebody who knew a girl called Natasha Kerwin, and knew her well.

As he reached the long clinic wall, and walked beside it, he began to remember something else.

Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree

Nor knows what birds—

He thought harder, frowning in concentration.

‘
Nor knows what birds have vanished—
'

And then the next words came to him.

‘
Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one
.'

He couldn't think of any more, but he could hear a woman's voice faintly saying, like somebody talking to him through a closed window, ‘Well done, Michael! Very well done!'

M
ichael.

Could that be his real name – Michael? Or was he simply remembering the name of a classmate? He didn't feel like a ‘Michael' any more than he felt like a ‘Gregory'.

He reached the turn-off to walk back down to Isobel's house. As he did so the black Escalade slid silently out of the clinic entrance and drove toward him. He pretended to ignore it, and carried on walking in the road, but the Escalade crept up behind him and then drew level.

Even when it was keeping pace with him, its engine softly burbling, he acted as if it wasn't there. After it had accompanied him about fifty yards down the road, however, its blacked-out passenger window came down with a whine and he was confronted by the white-haired, white-faced man in his sunglasses.

‘Take a wrong turn back there, sir?' the man asked in a tensile twang.

Michael looked at him for a long time before answering, trying to give the man the impression that he didn't know what the hell he was talking about, and even if he did it was none of his business. The man looked much younger than he had first imagined him to be. His skin was very smooth and his hair was albino white rather than white with age. Michael was tempted to ask him if he had seen him before, as a self-flagellating monk in
The Da
Vinci Code.

‘Just taking some exercise,' he replied. ‘As per Doctor Hamid's explicit instructions.'

‘Prefer if you restricted your walks to your own locality, sir,' the man told him. ‘Some of the individuals who live on Summit View are kind of sensitive about their privacy.'

‘Oh … like it's a “no-go” area? Sorry. Nobody told me.'

‘It's just a question of security, sir, and respecting other residents' personal space. We don't have “no-go” areas in Trinity.'

‘I'll have to correct you there,' Michael retorted. ‘Right outside Mrs Weston's house, with your nose pressed to the fucking window, that's a “no-go” area. Got it?'

Michael continued to walk down the slope and the Escalade continued to creep along beside him. The white-faced man stared at Michael from behind his sunglasses although his face was completely expressionless. After about fifteen seconds, he put up his window without saying another word and the Escalade drove away.

Maybe he hadn't been wise to provoke Trinity's security patrol like that, Michael thought. But here in Trinity, what was wise and what wasn't? It was impossible to judge. Maybe a little provocation would help him to find out what was going on in this community. Maybe there was nothing going on at all, in which case it wouldn't really matter if he made a few sharp remarks.

But if there was nothing going on at all, why had the security patrol cautioned him to stay away from Summit View, and more to the point, what was his sister Sue doing there, with Jack?

When he returned home, he found Isobel in the kitchen, which was warm and steamy. She was stirring a large herby-smelling pot of soup.

‘Hope you like minestrone,' she smiled, turning her face toward him so that he could kiss her.

‘If it tastes like it smells, then yes.'

‘How was your therapy?'

‘Useless. Catherine was away so I was stuck with some dopey Korean doctor who kept calling me “Gregory-ssi”.'

‘That's supposed to be polite, in Korean, isn't it?'

‘If that's polite, give me insulting any time.'

He watched while Isobel replaced the lid on the pot and turned down the gas. She hung up her apron and then came up to him and put her arms around him.

‘After my therapy was finished, I saw something very strange,' he told her.

‘Go on,' she said.

He didn't know if it was a good idea to be telling her this, because he had seen her talking to Sue as if they were old friends – even though Sue had denied it. But after being cautioned by the Trinity security patrol like that, he was in a mood to stir things up. Not only that, he felt that he had to tell
somebody
, and Isobel was the only person he could talk to. If he kept it to himself, he would have no way of judging if he was suffering from some sort of delusion. In short, he would have no way of knowing that he wasn't going mad.