‘No. I’d have told you. And Val, when she rang me. She’s doing her nut, isn’t she? I wouldn’t not say.’

‘How’s Becca’s mood been lately? Has she been down at all? Depressed?’

‘No. If anything, the opposite.’

‘Really? Any reason?’

‘I don’t think so.’ She looked to the window again, avoiding eye contact. Then, making a decision, she gave a short out-breath. ‘I don’t think it’s relevant – it’s not – but if this all goes … If something’s happened to her, I don’t want to be the one who didn’t say something that might have led – only indirectly, it won’t have anything to do with it at all, at all, but it’s information and—’

‘No one has to know it came from you, Lucy.’

‘Look, why I’m freaking out – I know she wouldn’t have just gone off somewhere because she had a reason to stay. A new reason.’

Robin felt it, the ratchet in her stomach that told her, progress.

‘They think I don’t know. And they’re only not telling me because of some stupid idea about it affecting our friendship or me feeling left out or something,’ she said. ‘Which is ridiculous because I’ve got Cal – that’s my boyfriend. Becca and Harry have started seeing each other. Well, not seeing – they’ve always seen each other. You know.’

‘They’ve got together – they’re sleeping together?’

‘Yeah. I mean, I imagine. They’re not telling me but they don’t exactly have to. The way they are around each other – like, we’ve known each other since we were eleven, we’re going to suddenly get shy?’

‘When did it start?’

‘Two or three months ago – December, the run-up to Christmas?’

‘What changed? Why suddenly, after all these years?’

Lucy shook her head. ‘I don’t know.’

‘What’s Southside? Hoo, you have been away. It’s what they’re calling it these days – China Town, the Gay Village, the theatres, that whole patch. Rebranding, isn’t it? Makes people see things differently.’ Maggie pulled hair out of her mouth. Upstairs, without a tree in sight, Robin hadn’t been aware of it but as she came down the long flight of steps to where Maggie had been waiting on the street, a bitter little wind had rushed to meet her, throwing her scarf in her face, whipping away body heat. She shoved her hands in her pockets.

A minute’s walk from Grand Central, they were back in the old city centre, brutal concrete and grimy glass, the Holiday Inn like a punch in the eye, Smallbrook Queensway and the long curved slug of the Ringway Centre, a line of low shops under four floors of grim concrete boxes that looked like somewhere you might have been sent in pre-Glasnost Russia if you’d made political enemies.