You couldn’t really see much from a car, not details, that must have been why he’d got out, to examine more closely this scene of his childhood pleasures. It seemed very small, not the wild expanse of brick hills and grassy gullies he remembered, but a scrubby little bit of land twenty feet wide and perhaps twice as long. Of course it had seemed bigger because he had been so much smaller, smaller even than this little boy who now sat on a brick mountain, eyeing him.

He didn’t mean to speak to the boy, for he wasn’t a child any more but a Man. And if there is an explicit rule that a child mustn’t speak to strangers, there is an explicit, unstated one, that a Man doesn’t speak to children. If he had meant to speak, his words would have been very different, something about having played there himself once perhaps, or having lived nearby. The words he did use came to his lips as if they had been placed there by some external (or deeply internal) ruling authority.

‘You’re trespassing on private land. Did you know that?’

The boy began to ease himself down. ‘All the kids play here, mister.’

‘Maybe, but that’s no excuse. Where do you live?’

In Petunia Street, but I’m going to my gran’s . . . No.

‘Upfield High Road.’

‘I think you’d better get in my car,’ the Man said, ‘and I’ll take you home.’

Doubtfully, the boy said, ‘There won’t be no one there. My mum works late Wednesdays and I haven’t got no dad. I’m to go straight home from school and have my tea and wait for when my mum comes at seven.’

Straight to my gran’s and have my tea and . . .

‘But you haven’t, have you? You hung about trespassing on other people’s property.’

‘You a cop, mister?’

‘Yes,’ said the Man, ‘yes, I am.’

The boy got into the car quite willingly. ‘Are we going to the cop shop?’

‘We may go to the police station later. I want to have a talk to you first. We’ll go . . .’ Where should they go? South London has many open spaces, commons they’re called. Wandsworth Common, Tooting Common, Streatham Common . . . What made him choose Drywood Common, so far away, a place he’d heard of but hadn’t visited, so far as he knew, in his life? The Man had known, and he was the Man now, wasn’t he? ‘We’ll go to Drywood and have a talk. There’s some chocolate on the dashboard shelf. Have a bit if you like.’ He started the car and they drove off past gran’s old house. ‘Have it all,’ he said.

The boy had it all. He introduced himself as Barry. He was eight and he had no brothers or sisters or father, just his mum who worked to keep them both. His mum had told him never to get into strangers’ cars, but a cop was different, wasn’t it?