And now finally he got to hang out with a girl from work. But it hadn’t turned out to be a small personal drama; it was weirder and more complicated. Her flatmate, or whoever he was, was threatening to do himself in, and Steffi was making Emil play real-life Cluedo at two in the morning.

As soon as they’d met, and with minimal explanation, she had dragged Emil into King’s Cross, which was in its bleak closing stages. We have to start somewhere, she’d said, and this is where he works, so who knows? But at this time of night it wasn’t really where anyone worked. The last trains had gone, the huge departure boards were all empty. The GNR bar had finished chucking out. A security man in a blue Puffa jacket was trying to wake a couple of people who’d gone to sleep not far from the ticket gates. One of them protested angrily. From what Emil could understand, she was catching an early train in the morning and had nowhere else to go. ‘I’m not hurting anyone, am I?’ she kept saying.

Emil had watched, curious and willing but mostly confused, as Steffi marched up to the security man and asked if he could help them. ‘We are looking for someone whose life is in danger,’ she said. Emil was impressed by the grandeur of it, and obscurely pleased to be caught up in something which sounded like a film. A life in danger. But it was cold, the miserable English cold-in-your-bones he hadn’t been prepared for even though everyone talked about it. And the quest made no sense. There was no chance of finding him here, surely, if he’d sent the text so long ago. There was no chance of finding him anywhere, without further clues. And there weren’t really any clues because Steffi hardly even seemed to know the guy they were searching for. He didn’t understand why she was taking it quite so personally.