‘Cornwall,’ he says when I ask him about it. ‘Decided to stop crunching carrots and upped sticks to head here.’

His accent is more rounded than the typical West Country burr, so I ask him how long he’s been up here.

‘Not long,’ he says. ‘Personally I’d love to lose the accent completely. Not exactly got good memories of the place.’

I want to find out more, but can’t exactly ask him to explain what he means. I decide to try another way around it.

‘Not keen to head back, then?’

He lets out a sarcastic chuckle and shakes his head. ‘No I am not. It’s a bit of a long story, but I might as well be open and honest from the start. I was married. We had a daughter. I totally understand if you want to get up and run now. Most do.’

‘Seriously? Why would they do that?’

Tom shrugs. ‘Dunno. I guess they have these ideas about how they’d like things to be. My baggage doesn’t quite fit into those plans.’

‘What happened?’ I ask. ‘I mean, you don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. I’m just genuinely interested.’

Tom lets out a deep breath. ‘Well, all seemed to be going fine. One day I came home and found a note on the kitchen table saying she wanted a fresh start and they were gone. That was the last I heard from her.’

‘Jesus. And she still lives down there?’

‘So I’m told. But her family won’t tell me a thing, obviously. Looking back, she was always going to self-destruct.’

‘So when was all this?’ I ask, trying to work out the dates in my mind.

‘A couple of years ago now. Seems like an age.’

‘So you don’t see your daughter?’

‘No,’ he says quietly, his face dropping. ‘I shelled out thousands trying to track her down. Hired a private detective, the lot. But she made up a load of stories about me so I couldn’t get joint custody. I almost lost my job. I worked from home most of the time, and obviously after all this I didn’t have a home. I couldn’t afford to keep the house by myself. I travel quite a bit for work anyway, so I knew it’d be handy to be closer to London and the airports and to give me a fresh start. My boss put me up in a flat he owns up here. This was all a little while after, of course. I stayed down in Cornwall for a long time, hoping things might work out. But after a year and a half or so, I was out of money and couldn’t keep the house on. I’ve been up here for three or four months now.’

I wasn’t expecting this. I wasn’t expecting any of this. ‘Wow,’ I say. ‘Sorry to hear that.’

‘The car’s not mine either,’ he says, somehow managing to get there before me. ‘That’s my boss’s too. He gets a company car, so he uses that and lets me use the Audi.’