It was a grey vinyl chair with wooden arms and a thin cushion, the kind that is in every hospital in the country, pushed up against the wall at an angle under the blind.

And the hospital bag was not beside it.

I noticed the bag before I noticed anything else, and that is the detail that has never stopped mattering, because the bag is how I knew within four seconds that this was not a man who had stepped out for a coffee.

A man going for a coffee leaves the bag.

The bag was gone, and his jacket was not over the back of the chair, and there was no cup on the windowsill and no folded newspaper and nothing at all in that corner of the room except a chair at an angle with the cushion perfectly flat.

Nobody had sat in it.