University was out—his parents couldn’t afford to support him during three years of further education, neither was he willing to burden himself with student loans. So, dressed in his cousin’s ill-fitting wedding suit, he headed for the City with his exam certificate, showing his three top-grade A-level passes, carefully folded in his inside pocket. He had no idea what he was doing or where he was going, but he was determined not to catch the tube back to Tottenham Hale without securing some sort of employment for himself.

He would have no doubt been forced to change his mind about that had it not been for the intervention of a kindly commissionaire who had been standing on the steps of a large, gargoyle-fronted building in Cheapside. He had witnessed Dan walk up and down the street four or five times, stopping outside offices, bracing himself to enter, then turning away with a shake of his head.

“You’re looking for a job, aren’t you, son?” he had said in a voice that would have sounded more fitting on an army parade ground. Dan had nodded meekly, and the commissionaire had given him a wink and flicked his head to motion him into the building. Twenty minutes later, he came out into the late morning sunshine with a photocopied list of stockbroker firms clutched in his hand.

It took exactly four and a half hours and the heavy scoring out of eight names on his list before Dan found himself a job. Walking triumphantly from the lift of the office block in Leadenhall Street, he crossed the reception area, tightly balling up the piece of paper in his fist. As he pushed open the heavy glass doors, he lobbed it into a tall chrome litter bin, then stood outside on the pavement, feeling as if he had reached up to discover that the sword of Damocles was so blunt that it couldn’t even cut through butter. Dan Porter, the office trainee from Tottenham Hale, had arrived in the City. From now on, he was going to do nothing but make money for himself.

And he had done just that for three years. No steady girlfriends, not too much excessive boozing. His two greatest expenditures were paying for his share of the rent on the flat that he had moved into with three other work colleagues just off Fulham Broadway, and the occasional sortie down King’s Road to buy clothes. And then, one Saturday afternoon, he met Jackie Entwhistle.