The Brightlings

5. Sailing by

Alan is used to staying up late to meet his deadlines. He can regularly be found prodding away at his laptop until the early hours, a glass of whisky on the desk, and a stream of words passing from his mind onto the screen via the grubby keys under his fingertips. But he doesn't mind one bit. Because Alan loves the night. He cherishes the silence, and the opportunity to unpick his jumbled thoughts. Alan is, without a shadow of a doubt, a night owl.

It is a warm evening. He lowers the driver side window, fumbles for the grimy knob on the front of the radio without looking away from the road, and turns it on. There is no reception, so he prods the auto-tune button and it runs through the frequencies several times over, before eventually settling on good old reliable Radio 4. The ageing night owl's station of choice.

Without skipping a note, he whistles along to the tail-end of the rousing theme music, and then the shipping forecast is in full swing. Biscay, Trafalgar, FitzRoy, Sole.... all names of exceptionally wet locations that he can never quite place, and all a reminder that, even though he hasn't been near the coast in several years, home is an island.

'Lundy, Fastnet, Irish Sea: North Westerly 3, but variable. Moving towards moderate. Mainly good.' It sounds like the weather is playing nicely again.

As he reaches the peak of the hill, the car begins to judder like an out of breath jogger, so he drops down into second gear. It is almost 1am.

Now, where is the entrance to that field?

No sooner has the thought entered his mind when he spots a gap in the hedgerow whizz past the passenger window. He reverses, jumps out to open a creaky gate, and then slowly edges the car through and into a position where it can't easily be seen from the road, turning off the ignition and killing the headlights.

He is parked on high ground with a view down across farm land towards the village. He reaches forward and winds down the window fully while he waits for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. It is an exceptionally clear night and the moon is full in the sky bathing the corn in a blue-tinged light. The stars are incredible.

He sticks his head out of the driver window and looks up. The splattering of tiny white dots are strangely reminiscent of the bathroom mirror after Cookie has finished brushing his teeth. He looks down over the valley and can just make out the church spire in the moonlight, and the tiny red flashing light on the top of a distant mast.

A series of pylons carrying electricity to the village runs from behind just by the left-hand side of the car down through the edge of the field. The metal towers are partly silhouetted against the starry sky and the cables are just visible. The towers produce an occasional rattling noise, like the sound of a Slinky Spring racing down a flight of stairs, accompanied by a faint buzzing. It is the kind of buzzing that one would imagine introducing a spark of life into Frankenstein's monster.

The lid of the thermos is sticky, but he always adds an extra sugar for luck. He adjusts the driver's seat into a reclining position and kicks off his shoes in the footwell. He imagines that he is at a drive-in cinema, the windscreen being a canvas onto which any action could be projected. But there is nothing happening save the gentle motion of the swaying crop and the occasional animal noise from the woodland over to his right. Half an hour passes, then another hour. He sees what looks like a vehicle flashing its headlights on a road beyond the fields up near the observatory. Then nothing again. It really was nothing.

He thinks about this sudden change of scene. The job offer couldn't have come at a better time really, despite the complaints from his wife and kids. And after the trouble that Felix had somehow got himself caught up in, it made a lot of sense to put some distance between the Swift family and Thornton Heath. It had started with a few late nights where it turned out that he wasn't where they thought he was, and then suddenly that Saturday afternoon when the police came to the door.