She’d started the glacial-pace Googling with The Spot itself. The first hit after its own website was a piece in the Post from when it opened. The photo showed ‘David Lawrence, manager’ at the bar with Tom Harris, Rob Wilson and Iain Ferguson, ‘three of the directors of New Avon Holdings, the syndicate of friends behind the new venture.’ Three suits in three different shades of grey, ties in silver and navy and an ill-advised mauve. Salt-and-pepper hair, softening jowls. The fug of middle-aged-male self-congratulation coming off it had got the back of her throat.

From there, she’d gone to the website for Companies House, where she’d got the other directors’ names – there were another three, apparently, six in total – their birthdays and postal addresses. In one of Maggie’s A4 notebooks, she’d allotted them a page each then started work. The whole thing was an object lesson in frustration: on top of the agonizing lack of speed, not one of them had an unusual name. Two of the three not pictured were called Steve – Baker and Perry – and the sixth was called Paul Smith, for Christ’s sake, which would mean scrolling through hundreds of pages of hits just to get past the fashion designer.

In the end, she’d texted Gid: Could you run a couple of searches for me? Not Hinton-related, promise. To her surprise, her phone pinged moments later: No. And stop asking.

She’d decided to look on the bright side: at least he hadn’t blocked her number. She’d begun to wonder.

There was a man on the door this time, headset and all; she felt his eyes on her before she was even out of the cab. When she reached the front of the line outside, however, his frank up-and-down was followed by a brief nod. If he’d been told to look out for her, he hadn’t recognized her. Or he had, and he’d been told to let her in.

He opened the door on a wall of noise. It was just before ten, Thursday night, and the front bar looked like a rush-hour Tube carriage, people crammed in back to back, bags between their feet, drinks held at shoulder level to give them a fighting chance. At the bar itself, the crowd was four or five deep, everyone yelling to get themselves heard. Some were still in office gear, straight from work, others dressed for the night in jeans and shirts or strappy tops. A perfume cloud hung in the air, people out to get lucky.