The succession of back gardens is mesmerizing. Most of these gardens, he notes, are given over wholly to children: littered with the bright-but-fading plastic of ride-on fire engines, cars, scooters, and the ubiquitous blue circles of trampolines. Unbelievable, thinks Logan, how people fill their whole garden up with these monstrosities. This garden they are passing now is so tiny you can barely get a good lungful of air out of it, yet even that has a six-foot trampoline whose safety netting touches the fences on either side. A few gardens on, there’s an above-ground pool. What profound optimist imagined they would get more than a week’s use of it? Like the trampolines, its chief colour is an unhealthy bright blue mouldered over with green. There are perhaps eight inches of brackish water in the bottom, sludged with a dark porridge of leaves. All this, he imagines, must be the result of parental competition. Look how much I love my children. And the children, no doubt, spend all of their time indoors, on screens.

Fewer than one in ten of these gardens show signs of being tended. Most are cluttered and unkempt. Sheds silver and rot. Unmown lawns are lumpy with tussocks. One or two have clumps of lonely, accidental-looking daffodils. All are edged with nettles and other out-of-control vegetation spilling over from the wild banks of the railway track. Nature outpaces owners who are too busy working to meet rents and mortgage payments to make time for mowing, weeding or, God forbid, relaxing.

This is what life has become, for most, he thinks. Mindlessly making ends meet till they croak. Thank God he is slightly removed from it all. Has the sort of career and reputation that bring him to spend a night in a decent hotel before giving expert testimony in a high-profile case at the Old Bailey. He will duck the cameras on the way in, but is prepared to be interviewed on the steps when he emerges. He has invested in a new suit. His hair has been cut, his sideburns trimmed. The pressure to have religious fundamentalism classified as a form of mental illness is growing daily. Logan is conscious that the words he chooses will be reported, and he has prepared them carefully. Has printed them off and folded them into his inside pocket, from which he now unfolds them to check, yet again, that they sound both clear and authoritative.

When the train finally limps into its terminus in the evening rush hour, Logan realizes something is wrong. Armed police stand in pairs at the barriers, semi-automatic rifles slung across their vis-vested chests. He spots the Metro in someone’s fist, shouting: RED ALERT! Despite his general aversion to news, this could affect his safety. He snatches a paper from the evening pile and finds a place to stand, out of the way of the streams of commuters weaving through each other to and from the various platforms.