‘You know the trouble with our clients?’ his boss had asked him. Giving Lee’s crumpled suit a disapproving stare, he said, ‘If you don’t look out, Prescott, they’ll bring you down to their level.’

Lee drops his files at reception. ‘Back in an hour,’ he tells the new receptionist, the one with the fingernails. Today they’re acid green, a colour that makes Lee wince. She nods and goes on tapping without giving him a glance.

It’s a sweltering late-August day outside, over thirty. Lee’s client follows him to the car park at the side of the building; he’s carrying a heavy rucksack and looks like he hasn’t been home for days.

‘Life’s been good to you, has it, Mr Kemp?’ Lee asks.

‘Yeah, I spose. Hah-hah.’ He offers, ‘You look older.’

‘I am older,’ Lee replies.

‘You want to go on a holiday now and then.’

‘I’ll do that, Mr Kemp.’ If only! He isn’t taking one this year. Half his colleagues are still on theirs, poaching themselves in the warm waters of Sardinia and Spain.

‘It’s just Darren. Plain old Daz.’ He has a skittish sort of charm and a rangy way of moving. He has a scab or a sore on one side of his jaw, and he keeps touching it with his fingers, giving it exploratory little strokes. Kemp is a user. Lee knows that. He has the user’s demeanour, the eyes that are sometimes lively, sometimes calculating, even sly, in the classic bait and switch that is particular to addicts. Normally, the knowledge that a client is using wouldn’t throw Lee. It shouldn’t bother him with Kemp. It shouldn’t – but it does.

‘Here,’ he says, when he reaches his car, ‘it’s this one.’

The phone in his pocket pulses. He checks it and sees a text. So what’s it to be? You coming? Ignoring this, he gets into the airless car. Once Kemp has done the same, he starts the ignition and pulls out onto the road.

‘What’s the charge?’ he asks Kemp.

‘There isn’t one. They haven’t charged me yet.’

‘Okay, so what’s it about then?’

‘Dealing.’

‘What substance?’

‘Meth.’