He drove the BMW carefully through the morning rush hour, saving his still-aching foot as best he could, enduring the traffic queues which he normally hated, until he arrived outside the grey Victorian terrace just behind Haymarket where Andy Martin lived. He parked, glancing in the driver's mirror as he climbed out of the car. He smiled, wincing, as he saw the swelling across the bridge of his nose, and the bruised bump around the cut.
`Let's see if you can beat that lot, boy,' he said to the sunny morning.
Martin's flat was on the second floor, and his injured foot made the climb awkward, but eventually he reached the blue-painted front door. He pressed the bell-push and waited. Thirty seconds passed without an answer. He pressed again, and waited for another minute. He smiled and shook his head.
`Dozy bastard,' he said. He pressed the bell for a third time and thumped the door with his fist. ‘Polis’ he shouted, disguising his voice, 'Open up in there!'
There was a muffled response from within. At last the door swung open. There stood a young woman. She was wearing a man's satin robe, in blue, with the monogram 'AM' on the breast pocket. She was rubbing her hair vigorously with a huge peach-coloured towel. One of its corners had fallen across her face.
`I'm sorry,' said the hooded woman, her speech muffled by the towel. 'I was in the shower. Andy's just nipped down to the shops to buy a paper and some-'
As she spoke she looked up and, as she did so, her voice grew more distinct, and the towel fell from her face. The sentence tailed off unfinished as she stared at Skinner. Her eyes were wide, mirroring the blank astonishment in his. Her mouth, like his, hung open slightly.
Time stopped. Afterwards, neither would be able to say for how long they stood there in their frozen tableau. But in whatever time it was, in that time worlds moved and lives changed.
Eventually the woman recovered her voice, or at least a vestige of it. She smiled, tentatively. `Hi, Pops.'