Two whiskies, and the night was black streamers. I had Peter’s hand in mine, and we were dashing up the Strand and then along the Mall. Saint James’s Park was a pool of darkness and as we slipped in among the pathways, I asked Peter if he’d ever gone cruising there.

“Not even a little? Not a Coldstream Guard or a member of the Household Cavalry? No, not even a little member?”

He shook his head. The water gleamed. There was no one there, not a dog, not a jogger.

“I’m thinking of inventing an app,” Peter was saying, “and when you open it, it will give you a history of all the crimes that have ever taken place in the surrounding area. All the murders and robberies and incidences of gross indecency and … slight indecency? Minor indecency? Going back to when records began.”

“Here Bishop Barnaby famously burned on a pyre his loyal servant Robert for serving his tea tepid.”

“Exactly.”

The cold was getting to my head. I crouched down and put a hand on the grass to steady myself. The earth was folded in on itself. Bleeding cold. I felt it reaching up my arm.

“‘And no birds sing.’”

“What?” Peter said.

“Where’s that from? ‘And no birds sing’?”

“Keats. ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci.’”

“Ah, the one about the fairy who enchants the knight.” I owed my reading to Peter. He was my friend, my special friend, my very best. I demanded a haircut like his, shoes like his. I tried complaining that I couldn’t see the board in a ploy to get glasses so I could be like Peter. No one expected anything of me, but if Peter was on the clever table, then so was I, even if it meant murder. I wasn’t going to let him escape me through the pages of a book.

My fingers sank through the grass into the dirt. To lie down, to get inside it, to be covered over. Just for a bit. Drinking thoughts. Peter pulled me up and led me over to a bench.

“Do we have anything to drink?”

“Nope.”

I opened my handbag and inside there was someone else’s pack of cigarettes, and a clutch of bar miniatures.

“Looky, looky.”

“That’s the girl I remember.” Out in the darkness, I heard the water part and glimpsed a serpentine neck dipping beneath the surface. He fell silent for a moment. “I saw David, Andy.”

I’d always thought it was Peter who was keeper of the great silence. Had it been me? And if so, for how long? I opened another little whiskey, a fairy-sized bottle of oblivion.

“And?” I felt a little rocket of rage going up. At an airport baggage carousel, wife and child in tow? On YouTube or giving a Ted Talk? Crouched on a pavement, begging for spare change?

“Does it matter?”

“How did he look?”