‘Ooh, this is gorgeous,’ she said when she got to an image of the fog-shrouded late-night Metro takeaway, its green and yellow neon blurring into a sickly hue that swirled over the hooded silhouettes of the smoking boys outside.

‘Yeah, I like it too. It’s our claim to fame,’ Vincent said, twirling a strand of her hair between his fingers.

‘What is?’

He pointed at the hand-lettered caption in the bottom-right corner. ‘“Ghost Town.” Haven’t you heard of it?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Surely?’ He went into an eerie falsetto: ‘“This to–own, yaa, yaya yaya.”’

‘Um.’

‘The Specials recorded it at the Brook Street studios, released it in June 1981. It was big that year – it was like the theme tune to a few months of serious discontent. People in the cities felt like they were being neglected by Thatcher, the unions were being crushed, the owners getting richer, the workers getting screwed. You know, the usual. There were a few riots, stamped out of course. Some of the papers even called it Ghost Town Summer.’

‘1981, you say? I have to ask, but how old are you? There’s no way you could have been there.’

‘I was. Just about. A baby.’

Okay, she was getting somewhere. He must be about forty. That seemed about right. ‘So not rioting, then?’

‘Not on the streets, no.’ He smiled and Petra was glad for the light tone, the opportunity to steer away from politics. ‘You’ll hear my granddad on that track if you listen carefully. He re-ran some of the bass tracks on the master in post-production.’

‘That’s cool,’ she said, and the magic of recording struck her for a moment like it must have struck the first people to hear a voice playing off a wax cylinder. Here was the ghostly imprint of a man who’d just died, still being heard every time the song was played. Of course, anyone who was filmed or recorded or photographed was immortalised in the same way, but the fact that Vincent’s granddad’s imprint was almost invisible, just a flicker of the imagination, like a shadow flitting in the peripheral vision, an arcane secret known only to a few people, made it seem somehow more charmed.

Then Vincent stared at the dark square of the uncurtained sky, resettling into a thoughtful mood as if remembering where he was, who he was.

‘You look sad,’ she said, knowing it was probably a stupid, presumptuous thing to say. You don’t probe too deeply into a guy’s personal life when you’ve seen him like three times.

‘Yeah?’ he said, looking up at her and smiling thinly. ‘Sorry. Just lots on my mind.’

‘None of my business, really,’ she said. ‘I know this will sound stupid and presumptuous, but I don’t think you’re a sad person. You feel like a really positive, optimistic guy to me, and I think you’re hurting.’ Where the hell did that come from?

He nodded, looked into her eyes and linked his fingers with hers, deliberately recalling their intimacy from a few hours ago. ‘True, I guess. They say people’s brain chemistry determines their happiness baseline – the level you run at when everything’s going fine. I think I used to be quite happy… but things have been pretty rough lately.’