James had known something was wrong when he woke up. At first, confused, he thought he had been roused by a knock at the door, one of Steffi’s packages. But when he stumbled to the door there was nobody there. Only then did he check his phone. Two missed calls, six texts. SIX texts. And all from Karl. Sometimes Karl did get drunk in the middle of the night and send odd things for James to laugh at: videos of sheep wandering into the sea, games he’d found online where you could calculate which Friends character you were (James hadn’t turned out to be any of them). But he knew in his heart that the half-dozen texts weren’t good news, and he was alarmed to find they were asking him to meet at a café at nine o’clock.

When James got there, Karl was toying with his phone, jiggling his legs; he wouldn’t meet James’s eye. A man in a cardigan, who looked like a down-on-his-luck portrait artist but turned out to be the waiter, offered James a choice of twenty-two variations on coffee. He scowled when James asked for a cup of tea and a glass of water; the water never arrived.

If Karl’s body was animated, his eyes were hard and flat, like he’d been drugged; the usual mischief was gone. He didn’t call James ‘fam’ or ‘Jamie’. He didn’t call him anything at all.

‘So, my question is, did you know Hamish Elton has been sleeping with the woman from …?’

He named something James presumed was a band, but the name meant no more to him than if two words had been randomly selected from the dictionary.

‘No. I don’t even know what that …’

Karl sighed. ‘All right, did you know he was cheating on his wife?’

James thought about it. ‘I suppose there have been pick-ups which – I mean, it was odd when I had to drive him to Brighton at 4 a.m. without using major roads – but it’s not my business to pry. I like Hamish. I mean, if I didn’t like him, I’m not the sort of person who would ever …’

‘Right, yeah, which is lovely,’ said Karl, exhaling deeply once more, ‘but at any point did anyone ask you about this stuff, and maybe you gave away slightly more than you should have?’

James was taken aback by the question.

‘Of course not. Why, what’s …?’

Karl slid his phone across the table. On the screen was the front page of a national newspaper, a headline. James winced.

‘Oh dear.’