The look on the four faces would have been heart-wrenching if it weren't for the fact that Edmund was convinced that they were figments of the thing that was supposed to be coffee that he had been drinking for the past week. Ignoring the shock, he turned and shut the door behind him – not slammed, he learnt that was wrong from the moment he was little – and collapsed on the sofa, hand automatically going for the cup of coffee next to him. He drank two mouthfuls before he realised that the coffee had been there since yesterday, and the next few moments were spent trying to remove the taste of cold, rank coffee from his mouth, and making a new one. He looked briefly in the hall mirror, and grimaced at the horror that stared back. His hair hung limply from his head, over exhausted blue eyes that seemed sunk in a fatigued face. His shirt and tie were hanging out and crumpled, and he looked like he was on drugs.
"Lucy would kill me right now, so would Susan and Peter", he thought, and wondered how they were doing, he hadn't heard from them in a while.
"or it could be that they've written and I haven't read it", he thought again, realising that he had stepped over a rather large pile of letters twice, both on his way in, and to see the hallucinations in front of his door.
Edmund rubbed a hand across his face in a desperate attempt to stave the pain that his eyes were giving him, and gave up trying to see properly, falling back onto the sofa, shutting his eyes in blessed peace, his coffee lying on the table next to the sofa, staying undrunk, as Edmund dreamt, dreamt of a far-away land he hadn't dreamt of since he was little, a land that was still painfully familiar...
He stared out over the bay, seeing the glittering sea lap gently on the smooth sand of the shore, interspersed with brightly coloured shells, which he knew intimately. A thought came through his head that he should collect one or two for his sisters, Lucy would love them, and he was sure that Susan would make it into something practical and beautiful. He bent down, trying to pick one up, and they seemed stuck to the sand. He knelt down, and a voice echoed in the wind.
"Edmund..." it called, and he wondered where it came from, it seemed so familiar. He tried looking, but the scene swam in front of his face, as he woke up...
He came to lying awkwardly on the sofa, his head bent at a degree different to his arm which he was resting on, and that was different to his body. He sat moaning in pain until he unfolded, and rubbed his eyes, seeing the sunlight streaming in through the window, filtering over the cups and paperwork that were strewn over the front room.
"Oh God..." he looked at the time on the old clock given to him by an old friend who looked after him and his siblings during the war.
"Oh God!" clambering up from his position on the sofa, racing around gathering papers, changing his shirt, and tearing out of the door towards the station, papers stuffed in a briefcase, coat half-on and hair unbrushed, as he tore towards the police station where his client was being held. He stopped briefly at the alley next to his house, as he caught a brief movement, but ignored the view he had of a shadow that looked like a horse hiding behind the bins, but carried on running towards the cells, towards yet another meeting with Britain's most wanted man...