‘One: it’s half past four in the morning so the fella will be asleep. Two: what is he going to do? He’s on the telly, he’s not Superman, he’s not just going to fly down and grab James off a building or …’

Once more it was as if this woman had been given a script of his objections in advance, and worked on a set of rebuttals. ‘You need to ask him to get onto Twitter and re-tweet what I have written about James, also to share it on his Facebook. He has three hundred thousand followers, many fans on Facebook also. If we can’t get hold of James, we have to get more people looking. I have been in touch with all his contacts, nearly, that I know about.’

Or if not a trick, a dream – that was what this was like, thought Karl. It was very close to being nuts enough that he could believe it was a nightmare, and that he had reached that semi-aware state your dreaming self sometimes did, where even in the dream you started to call its bluff. Like that dream where he’d had a talking horse and inexplicably only sold it for £200 and was full of remorse as it got more and more famous. Yeah, he’d seen through that bollocks even as he was dreaming it. But this wasn’t far off. James was saying he was going to kill himself, this woman was ringing him, talking about Hamish Elton, talking about stuff she shouldn’t know about. Making demands about Twitter and God knew what else.

‘Or if you give me his number,’ she was saying now, unbelievably, ‘I will call him, this guy.’

‘I can’t give you his number.’ Karl felt a claw of panic stirring his stomach. He was going to have to go to the toilet here, which – if the reviews were accurate – would be even less of a barrel of laughs than taking a shit in a services normally was. But only if the guy was still asleep. And even then he’d have to be so quick or the prick would wake up and wonder why he was on his own in the car and then the tip really would be as dead as the fax machine.

‘And you can’t call him,’ he said. ‘You can’t disturb him, over this.’

‘So then, you need to …’