My journey of the next day to Wendmere was long and exceptionally, almost perversely, winding. Requiring, as it did, a taxi, a train ride and then a further taxi to transport me and my bag of meagre possessions to their new rural abode.

  I’d made this even more convoluted as, mindful all may not be well on the, you know, professional front, I'd swapped rides a couple of times across London and insisted the last cab dropped me off at Bakerloo Underground. From there, in flagrant disregard for my desperate financial distress, I rode the tube for the last hundred or so yards it took to reach Marylebone Station.

  To be honest, anyone that could have tracked me door to door through all that deserved their shot at me. Griff would have been proud. Or rather, he'd have pointed out the hundreds of facial recognition cameras I was constantly popping up in front of and tell me to 'stop poncing about playing cat-and-mouse and get out of town.'

  I guessed we could call that one a mental score draw.

  At the ticket office, baseball cap pulled low over my face, I purchased tickets to four exceptionally disparate destinations—all on different credit cards, which pretty much cleared out the remainder of my funds—then spent an uncomfortable ten minutes doing my best to significantly alter my appearance in a cramped toilet stall. Christ knows what the guy next to me thought I was up to in there, but he'd made good his exit before I emerged.

  Finally, I surreptitiously located someone willing to swap ￡500 worth of open-travel train tickets for one that was going to a totally different, yet very specific, part of the West Midlands. If you find that odd, don’t. It's a London train station. I could have found someone willing to pay ￡1k for a pint of my blood without needing to look particularly hard.

  Then, with as much savoir faire as I could summon in the circumstances, just as its doors were slipping closed, I dove onto a train which would be calling into, eventually, Wendmere.

  And, thanks to all that – maybe - I didn't think anyone followed me on board.

  But, then again, anyone with enough craft to see through my half-arsed attempts at subterfuge could reasonably be expected to have enough about them to also have evaded my notice. Ah, welcome back, self-doubt and paranoia. Good to see you, old friends.

  Saying that, and despite the adrenaline racing through me, my northward journey by rail was, at best, spectacularly leisurely. To which I can confirm that there was, indeed, plenty of time to stand and stare. And it sucked.

  Over the first hour, the familiar cityscape of London and its environs gradually gave way to endless stretches of countryside, and I was increasingly reminded as to why I had visited Aunt M so rarely once I was old enough to say, ‘not on your life.’

  My phone signal dropped from 5G to 4G, held heroically at 3G for about twenty minutes, and then wholly gave up the ghost somewhere near Banbury. Still, it wasn’t like I had anyone I was going to call, was it? At least, no one who would answer.

  That train ride wasn't quite the dullest few hours of my life - I was still on full-on alert for anyone following me - but even so, it was damn close. And when I tell you that Beth loved weekly reruns of 'The Greatest Showman,' I hope you realise I have quite some contextual ennui to play with here.

  As mid-afternoon gave way to early evening, the carriage slowly emptied of anyone I was remotely suspicious of, and – as far as I was concerned - no obvious secondary teams appeared to replace them. Even so, I left the train a few times in the shires, giving every indication I'd reached my destination, before jumping back onboard just as the doors beeped closed.

  Other than earn myself a few glares from the conductor, though, no one else seemed inclined to join in my impromptu game of rail-based hokey-cokey. Maybe I’d actually been able to slip away from London with minimum fuss? Yeah, sure. Because my luck was just so in, right now.

  One thing of interest that did happen, though, was the woman who embarked on the last-but-one stop before Wendmere.

  I knew I was very much in rebound territory, but even at my most coupled, I would still have checked her out. She was short, dark and had that sort of heart-shaped face I'd spent my teenage years drawing in a terrible attempt to craft my own anime characters.

  I assume she'd been working late somewhere as she was dressed in a snazzy business suit with a jacket that only just covered an extremely ample bosom – my God, I really need to update my dating game - and had a laptop case strung over her back.

  The carriage – in fact, the whole train - was pretty much empty by this stage, and the early evening sun was rapidly giving way to night. The second she got on, she glanced at me warily and made to move to another carriage.

  I didn't take offence. Even on a well-lit street with hundreds of bystanders, I didn't exactly look like someone a lone woman would be glad to encounter. Too much height, too much hair and - just recently, according to Beth – too much bulk.

  However, something made her pause in her hurried exit, and she dropped into the seat nearest the door, pulling her coat tightly around her. This would be due to the little voice in her head that said, 'I'm British and middle-class; to be rude to a stranger is an executable offence', which shouted slightly louder than 'get as far away from the scary-looking caveman in the corner as soon as possible.'

  That actually happens to me more often than you'd think.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  As someone who makes—or at least used to make—quite a living from exploiting the gaps between people’s primaeval instincts and the layers of civilisation built to keep them in check, I've spent time pondering about how the quiet voice buried deep in your gut works.

  Because it's more complicated than simple fear or caution.

  You see, we’re the antecedents of those whose ancient survival toolkit worked just fine. We’re the progeny of those who, when things got real, had a way to survive that predated language, logic, and manners. Modernity tells us to smile politely. To shake hands. To trust. But the creature behind your eyes—the one who woke each morning to a world that wanted to eat it—remembers. It picks up signals your conscious mind doesn’t even register. That half-second of hesitation in a handshake. The tension that lingers right at the corner of a smile. The eye contact in a silence that lasts just a beat too long.

  That's your 'gut instinct' at work. It's not mysticism; it’s your subconscious connecting dots your conscious mind hasn’t even seen yet. It’s your hardwired, hair-trigger certainty that danger lurks behind a friendly face.

  A big part of my job is – was? I don’t really know anymore – being really good at making people ignore that certainty. And, at their leisure, regretting it. So, take it from me when I tell you to resist playing nice when the voice in your head says ‘run’. The women at the end of the carriage hadn’t learned that truth the hard way yet.

  In a way, I envied her.

  We both did our best to ignore each other for the last fifteen minutes of my journey. By this, I mean I only stared at her a few hundred times. I’m sure she noticed, and I doubt the attention made her feel especially relaxed. But then I was standing up to leave as the train was pulling into my stop. Which, of course, turned out to be her destination, too.

  A look of panic entered her eyes as she saw me shambling up behind where she was waiting for the carriage doors to open. I stopped a little way off, held up my open palms, and put on my sheepiest of sheepy grins.

  "Honestly, love, this is my stop. I'm not following you or anything."

  She frowned at me, keys shifting in her grip into a makeshift weapon. "I don’t know you. You don't live in the village."

  Her voice had a soft burr to it, stirring another million childhood memories. Well, wasn’t I having quite the series of flashbacks of late? It was actually one of the first accents I'd properly mastered, but it had been an age since I'd heard anyone else speak in it.

  It was my go-to voice when I wanted someone to trust me.

  I slipped it on now like an old overcoat, smoothing the transition out subtly so she didn't register I'd not spoken with it before. "Actually, I think I do now. I'm Elijah Meddings. Margaret's nephew? From Halfway Hold?"

  That information seemed to calm her down some, and - after a short stand-off - we both managed to get off the train without any acts of violence being inflicted.

  Wendmere Station was far smaller than I remembered - I guess that's because you’re much bigger than the last time you were here, doofus - and we found ourselves forced to make awkward conversation under the only working light in the car park while waiting for her taxi to arrive.

  I'd had a vague notion I'd be able to pick up transport of my own from the station, but as the place was utterly deserted, I was reluctantly gearing myself up for a hike across barely familiar countryside. It wouldn't be my first such nighttime yomp, but I'd usually got a little more geographical preparation under my belt other than vaguely knowing that 'it's over yonder'. I wasn't exactly salivating at the prospect and it obviously showed on my face.

  The woman—her name was Katja—watched me look around bemusedly at the lack of metropolitan bustle before politely asking if I needed the number of the local taxi firm. Not to share her own ride, I noticed, but I could hardly blame her for that after mentally ragging on her for sharing a train carriage with me against her better judgement.

  I'd been about to refuse the offer, but glancing at my phone and seeing I was still in an internet blackspot, I thought again. Even then, though, I hesitated, not wanting to be seen to impose, but then there was a soft rumble of thunder, and—well—my hair gets awfully frizzy when wet.

  "Sure, if you didn't mind. A number would be great."

  It took about twenty minutes for her taxi to appear—mine was half an hour further behind, apparently—so I did my best to keep up my end of the conversation despite having no viable social filter.

  It sounded like she did something to do with science up at the university, so this gave me an in to hold forth with a full-blown techgasm about the latest developments in computer gaming. It took longer than I might have hoped before I realised I was, once again, not reading the interest levels of the room. Or the car park. You know what I'm saying.

  Katja, bless her soul, saw the moment when my brain caught up with my mouth and smiled. It was a nice smile. "Hey, don't worry about it. It's good to have things you're passionate about. Besides," and she leant towards me in a slightly conspiratorial way, "it's not like there's much else to do around here. If it wasn't for being able to live a little online, I think most of us out here would go insane!"

  "Do you game?" I asked, surprised. Not that girls didn't, but more a little astonished that there was anyone this far out into the sticks that had even heard of electricity, let alone super-fast broadband. For all her scientific interests, Aunt M had never shown much inclination to even have a phone line fitted, much less a Wi-Fi hotspot.

  It was one of the big reasons I’d found it hard to stay in touch with her.

  But then Katja's taxi arrived before she could answer, and I was helping her get her bag into its boot. "Look," I said, seeking the opportunity of showing off how very, very strong I was as a segue into her pants - hey, don't judge. It's been known to work - "If you ever find yourself playing Valora Online, drop me a message. My username is Resonance."

  As chat-up lines go, I recognised this was so lame a compassionate veterinarian would immediately have put it down. Still, it had been some time since I'd needed to play any of these particular cards, and I was doing the best I could.

  At least I didn’t just pull her hair and run away.

  Katja smiled again and said she hoped I reached my destination okay. There were a few more polite comments about catching up in the village – in, presumably the light and with all sorts of witnesses - and then she was gone.

  It would be fair to say that, after that hot and spicey flirtation-fest, the thirty minutes on my own in the car park dragged more than a touch. Especially as rain began falling in that very English way you didn’t tend to get anywhere else. Not proper sheets, but just enough drizzle about it to properly drench me through. Shivering, I opened my rucksack and added another layer of hoodie, but the cold was settling deep into my bones.

  But, no. It wasn’t just the ‘cold’ that had the hairs on the back of my neck standing straight up, was it?

  As rubbish as the last month or so had gone, I was still in possession of some pretty decent instincts. And they were telling me that somewhere out in the darkness around Wendmere, I was being watched.

  And I didn't think it was because whoever it was saw my arrival as the chance to welcome their new best friend.