Ghostwalk

Science doesn't reduce things, or explain mysteries away; it just discovers stranger and stranger things.

It's only when you've pieced together a story in several different ways that you realise where the holes are, discover the knowledge that is still missing, the questions you still need to ask.

Beyond this point on the river Cambridge became a kind of miniature Venice, its river water lapping up against the ancient stone of college walls, here mottled and reddened brick, there white stone. Stained, lichened, softened by water light. Here the river became a great north-south tunnel, a gothic castle from the river, flanked by locked iron gates, steps leading nowhere, labyrinths, trapdoors, landing stages where barges had unloaded their freight: crates of fine wines, flour, oats, candles, fine meats carried into the damp darkness of college cellars.

Isn't it always unfair - death always a kind of outrage? A life ended too soon with jagged and torn edges, a sentence incomplete.

I didn't like crab. Not at all. My stepmother had tricked my into eating a crab sandwich once in a cafe in Cromer, told me it was tuna. I'd never forgiven her.

Stepping into the smell of a long-abandoned aple crop, Cameron called towards the house, hoping to catch his mother's attention in the window where she would be sitting working

The great skill in lying is not lying, you'd say. Just leaving things out. Keeping everything as close to the actual truth as possible. Nothing overblown.