The day after my meeting with Mr. Hutchinson, as my hero, armed with a hunting knife, stabbed and slashed and slit his way toward the enemy lair, sending up fountains of blood, the news featured a line of men kneeling in the desert awaiting execution; a herd of refugees with their saucer-eyed children, knee-deep in mud, corralled at a border by armed men in black; and a special report on the links between London-based financiers and Russian kleptocrats revealed by the leaked papers. I was mechanically eating cereal with peanut butter. A girl had gone missing. Her picture was everywhere, her face young and painfully open and now marked for death—she was missing, feared something-ed. By tea time she would be found something-ed. The hero of the film, no matter how hard he fought, was unable to save the girl with her shining eyes and plait done up with a pink bobble.

Rob was an unlikely savior, but he brought the episode to an end, quite swiftly around four o’clock. It was Rob Calcraft I had messaged at the bar. Rob from the manor; Rob who was once the kind of boy who would smirk when he was being told off, who would have been unable to stop no matter how much worse it made matters.

I’d invited him to connect with me and then written, I need to talk to you. I’d never bothered uploading a profile pic so I’d added, It’s Andy, remember? From Marlborough.

The message I got back the next day went, Oh I remember! Phone number?

I hesitated, but only a little, then sent the digits across. Then nothing. I went back to my hero, who was fighting a bad man in the cockpit of a plane, eventually biting him on the face before strangling him with a parachute cord and throwing him out the back, the phone cradled in my lap. On another screen I searched for news of the man who’d come off the roof three nights before. His name was Ward Collier. He’d worked in the city and was engaged to be married before he’d jumped or fallen from the top of the multistory car park. The family was mystified.

After a short interval, long enough to suggest someone enjoying the tension but unable to really wait, my phone rang and I jumped like a bomb had gone off.

Rob, sounding much the same, insisted we meet at his club. It was one of the old ones, one of the last to finally admit women. He seemed surprised that I knew where it was but quickly recovered. Before he rang off, he asked me if he would recognize me.

“I think you’ll know me, Rob.”

“Will I? Will I indeed?”

His parting line contained the same mix of malice and bonhomie I remembered: