‘Are they not together then?’

‘You’re being boring now. Go on, piss off.’

The man waves the reporter away, knocking the phone out of his hand.

The footage ends there.

Her mouth dry, Becky skims the blog post’s text. The man in the video is identified as one of Amber’s best friends, fellow actor and noted bon vivant Ollie Hennessy. An update on the article says that Hennessy has clarified that he spoke out of turn and that he apologizes for having a big, drunk mouth.

It’s far from being a retraction.

David Barraclough, Amber Heath’s agent at Total Agents, has been asked for a comment but hasn’t replied to the website’s overtures.

Becky looks behind her, out of the grey-dusted rear window, as if she’s being followed. The traffic is moving fast and she struggles to calculate how long she’ll need between alerting the driver, the cab making a safe stop, the wait for the door’s red light, opening the door and vomiting onto the pavement.

DB. Such a nice man. Such a nice lunch they had together. She looks at his client list online. Amber is a relatively small fish. Becky tries to remember: had DB pitched Amber before? Perhaps for a supporting part in something that fell apart days before shooting was due to begin? Perhaps Amber maybe even came in to meet for it? Becky tries to think back but the panic is making it hard to ground her thoughts. Was Matthew there? Did he offer an opinion?

She tries to search her phone for more information, each movement cumbersome, clumsy, misdirected and slow now that her hands seem not to be working properly.

Twitter has picked up on the story. Questions being thrown about.

She thinks about Amber’s blonde hair spread across Matthew’s floor. That same hair tamed and tied up in chignons on red carpets and plaited in the pages of celebrity magazines.

Becky closes her eyes and tries to remember precisely what she saw but all she can see is the blue-veined path on the map flashing its crooked line.

The cab swings left and a motorbike comes for them, swerves at the last minute to avoid the collision and skids away.

Regent Street gives way to a narrow maze of Soho streets with shoppers and workers idly walking the narrow pavements, blackened and sticky outside pubs where beer spilt from the night before traps ash and litter and diesel fumes.

‘Here,’ she says, when the black cab gets to Soho Square. She pays and waves away her change. Can’t think about that. Lands on the pavement, still bent from exiting the cab, no time to hold her hair back, her head tips forward and then, yes, she vomits. Her hair swings into the sick, like vines in the breeze.