First: the customer, the DJ, had an attitude on him. He wanted to sleep, in fact he had to sleep, that was his thing. As soon as he got in the back. ‘I have to sleep, mate. All the way, yeah? Wake me up at the hotel, I don’t want to wake up at all till then. At all. Yeah?’ Fair enough, it was late: though from what Karl could make out, the geezer had only been on stage for an hour. You’d think he’d been doing mountain rescue the way he talked, you’d think he’d been doing mountain rescue and working a pizza oven at the same time. Still. Fine. Customer always right. But Karl didn’t have the power to guarantee that the guy could ‘just sleep’ all the way. This wasn’t a magic carpet service. This was two hundred and eighty-two miles of bloody tarmac.

And tonight, crossing even a tiny area of that tarmac had been the ball-ache to end all ball-aches. More than half an hour to get away from the Wembley area. The stadium, the arena, all of it, absolute murder to get away from. If Karl had three wishes, he’d use one of them to set the whole place on fire. Not with people in it; he wasn’t a psychopath. And anyway, the genies couldn’t kill people, could they – at least not in Aladdin. That was one of the terms and conditions. Yeah, wish one would be to tear down this whole area. Wish two, that he’d never given James the job of driving Hamish Elton, so he’d never have had to sack him. Wish three, thought Karl, glancing in the rear-view mirror to make sure the guy was asleep, would be the old ‘infinite wishes’ trick, but they probably had a procedure for that, so that people couldn’t take the piss. Well. Karl wasn’t going to wait around for genies. He was used to working his own miracles. He wasn’t going to fuck about rubbing a lamp when his phone contained the riches it did.

A slalom of temporary traffic lights, hi-vis jackets carving up the roads. Like most drivers in a big city, Karl had long stopped associating workmen with any sort of improvement or even change. He barely saw them as people. He just saw a sort of cartoon figure, a helium balloon with a grinning face on it, who’d come out with a spade just for the fun of it, to make a great big hole where Karl wanted his car to go.