The bouncer respectfully lifted the red rope and Steve Warboys gave me a blank stare as he brushed past. He gave an almost imperceptible nod to the doorman.

‘All right, Steve,’ said the doorman.

And he turned to me, thawing a little.

‘That’s five hundred then, brother,’ he said. ‘Enjoy your evening.’

It took a long moment for my eyes to adjust to the dark inside the Champagne Room. When my sight came back I saw elevated stages, each one featuring a young woman in minimal pants and maximum heels winding herself around a silver fireman’s pole.

Tattoos stained naked flesh like the symptoms of some contagious disease. There were more women lurking in the shadows, wearing diaphanous see-through clothes that were possibly nightwear, roaming the perimeter of the club, judging their next move. The place was huge – a perk of building it by the side of a motorway in the middle of all those fields rather than the middle of London.

The men were divided into two groups. There were the loud, drunken City boys in suits and ties who had been moving money in the financial centre of the world a few hours earlier, and there were the older, solitary figures who sat alone at the bar or with a girl astride them at one of the numerous tables that lurked in every nook and cranny of that cavernous space. The groups of City boys acted as if they were having the time of their life and the men who were alone acted as if they were having root canal treatment. The only reveller who didn’t fit into either clan was a neatly bearded Middle Eastern man in a Yankees baseball cap at the bar, with a woman on each knee.

A soft hand touched my arm.

She was a pretty blonde, only in her mid-twenties but with many miles on the clock. She was small, but her heels added five inches, and she wore a black sleeveless cocktail dress that seemed to stop before it had even begun. She tugged modestly at its top, a gesture that seemed to emphasise her semi-nakedness rather than disguise it.

‘You want party?’ she asked.

‘How about a drink?’ I said.

I looked around for Billy and saw him being led into the darkness by two women in baby dolls. There goes the budget of the Metropolitan Police for another year, I thought, as I was gently steered in the opposite direction.

She found us a table.

A waiter – a young woman dressed in black tie – was immediately by our side, taking the order. My new friend crossed her legs and again pulled up the top of her dress, her manner veering between brazen and modest.

It was even darker at the table, but not so dark that I could not see the bruises on her arms, as mottled as camouflage.

‘What happened to you?’ I said.