There was lots of it about. That hunger. Some of the young ones would keep going till they fell asleep at the wheel, if he let them. Everyone needed the wedge. The fella who’d replaced James had recently done an eighteen-hour stint, which wasn’t technically illegal, but also wasn’t technically a good idea at all. By the end of the shift, his texts had read as if a dog was walking across the screen. Yes, there were a dozen of them who’d do the big schleps. It was where the proper money was. And some of these gold card clients, like the DJ geezer who was currently in the back of Karl’s car, were also capable of coming out with fairy-tale tips. A footballer had once given Karl a pair of trainers, brand new, and – as it turned out – worth £400. Just handed them over at the drop-off. ‘Do you want these, pal?’ Karl had put them on eBay, and someone had paid the reserve price before he got home.

A story had done the rounds about a female driver – little bit of a rarity, in this industry – who’d got a pop star to Gatwick against a very tight deadline and, the next morning, found ten grand in her account. No reference. No sender name. Just a set of life-changing digits. And she’d gone well over the limit, by all accounts. She could have lost her licence, game over. Or, of course, lost more than that. Someone pulls out at a corner, she goes into the back of them, lights out. But the point was, none of these things did happen. She won the gamble and she won the ten thousand big ones. And that was what you were in this job for.

How many other jobs could you watch money coming in every time you got a text, any time the phone hummed in its little perch on the dashboard? And how many people like Karl, whose dad used to wallop him, who dropped out of school at 16, could have built an app like that? Or rather a whole empire, powered by an app?

Yes, life was sweeter than he’d ever thought it could be. But tonight – tonight, as he and James used to say, had not been the dream.