I had the little telephone box in a plastic carrier bag at my feet and nearly forgot it in the press to get out of the carriage. My head wasn’t right. Lack of sleep. Unwelcome thoughts. Dredging up the past was no help to Peter, and it certainly wasn’t helping me. But now that it had started, it wouldn’t stop. In the middle of the night, just to do something, I’d called and left messages at the offices of a half-dozen private detectives suggested by Google. Mr. Hutchinson had been the first to call me back, on the dot of nine, offering to see me at twelve.

The website had shown an aerial photo of the Thames at night, but when I found the address and rang the doorbell, I found myself climbing a dingy, narrow staircase above a fried chicken shop. The beige carpet was tacky underfoot and the whole building, part of a row of three-story late Victorian terraces, seemed imbued with grease. A film of it shimmered on the walls as though the building was sweating it out.

By the time I got to the top, I was unsurprised when Mr. Hutchinson came to the door himself. Unbelievably, a half-eaten box of fried chicken sat on his desk next to a couple of laptops and a phone. The detective clearly outsourced the honey-trapping. Mr. Hutchinson was a slight man, hardly taller than me but a few years older, with a large forehead and bulbous, slightly hunted eyes. A door led off the office, and without looking I knew that behind it would be a single bed, a kitchenette, a bathroom with a fraying towel, a cracked bar of soap, and a single bottle of value shower gel.

“Thank you for fitting me in.” I shook Hutchinson’s hand. He invited me to call him Steven and to sit down.

“It’s a missing person?”

I told him about Patricia’s phone call. Old-school style, he made crabbed notes in a spiral notebook, taking down Peter’s date of birth, address, email, and phone number.

“Corporate law?”

“Yes.”

“And you and Mr. White are close? But not…?”

“Peter is gay.” He paused for a moment and then wrote that down too.

“Do you have the contact details for any of his colleagues?”

I did not. The interview went on. I told him about the wedding, that I believed Peter traveled a lot. I described my visit to Peter’s apartment. In answer to his questions, I said that there was nothing that led me to believe Peter was suicidal, or had problems with drugs, or money, or a relationship. I told him the names of Peter’s boyfriends, Anders the Norwegian, Karsten von Kloss who had been eaten by a cannibal, and by dredging my memory an assortment of first names—Matthew, Patrick, Juan—that could have belonged to anyone.

“Could he have broken the law?”

“I wouldn’t have thought so.”