‘What am I going to do for work?’ James had asked, into a second bottle – awful wine, even worse than the first, because bless him, he simply couldn’t tell a bottle of vinegar from something Louis XIV would have ordered. Karl felt an obvious response come into his head, so obvious that he auditioned it silently a couple of times in case the booze was putting a gloss on a load of shit. But no. It was obvious because it was right.

‘Surely you get back full time with Cruiz, don’t you? Just pick up the old driving again?’

James stared sadly at his glass of wine, as if the suggestion had come from there. ‘Raymond’s not just going to start giving me loads of hours again. I left, I’m not sure if you remember.’ It was quite unusual, even this tiptoeing sarcasm, for him: Karl had a hint of the pain that was beneath everything James said. Why hadn’t he encouraged James to talk more, Karl reproached himself. But now, now he could wave a magic wand and clear whatever debt he’d put himself in by getting the hump when James had gone off with Michaela. It could be like old times.

‘Mate,’ he said, ‘I don’t think you completely realize how much I’m in charge of Cruiz now. I’ve built them an app which—’

‘I saw it. Like the Addison Lee app.’

‘But not like that, Jamie.’ Karl grabbed James’s elbow. He felt the tension in every fibre of his friend’s body, felt for a second how much of a physical effort it was even to walk around as James at the moment. ‘Way better. It’s the sort of thing we were trying to do ten years ago and now you can actually do it. Works out where customers are, works out where they want to go, pretty much before they do. Looks at the sort of stuff they like, suggests behaviour without them even being aware of it …’

‘Looks at the sort of stuff they like, how?’ James frowned, puzzled and intrigued. ‘Going onto other platforms? Harvesting … how?’

‘Just using algorithms, using data that they signed up to give away.’ Karl’s eyes were lively and James got a glimpse of his friend as he had been in the old days, computer light on his face, inside a piece of code like a surgeon inside a body, shoring it up and sending it back out healthy into the world. James remembered how Karl used to talk about information being the cash of the future, which was just as well because he and his mum had never had the cash of the present, i.e. actual cash, and one of these decades they were going to get their turn to live well.

‘Is it legal?’ asked James.