Actually, I do think I’m better than you, Darren. But Lee doesn’t have to answer; the tape relieves him of this duty. His only task, it seems, is to endure the forced excursion. He goes on hating nature just to have something to focus on. Look! Here’s some holly thrusting up beside the trees. Here’s a stand of spindly birches. Here’s a dip downhill. He hears a bird’s falling cry, repeated without answer. Are there no other creatures in this wood apart from that one squirrel? Is that the ring road he can hear? The woods are too quiet and too noisy at the same time. Emptied of wild noises, they reverberate with the distant traffic and, briefly, the doof doof of a car stereo somewhere.

Soon they come to a glade of verdant green, an Arcadian vision. Arcadia, the home of Pan, the god of all the wild, thinks Lee. He knows this from trailing his ex-girlfriend through successive art museums. From Pan’s name comes the word panic. Funny that, he thinks. He glances over his shoulder. Kemp is toting his rucksack like an overgrown schoolboy, is for a moment the fifteen-year-old Lee knew. Back then he had spirit, a bit of pluck. He’d stood out from the parade of sullen defendants.

‘This isn’t personal, understand,’ says Kemp. ‘It’s just to teach you a lesson.’

‘Definitely, I know,’ Lee would say if he could speak. Then again, this makes no sense. Of course it’s personal. Who is to receive the lesson, if not him, Lee Prescott, in his capacity as a person, a living, breathing being who bleeds when his skin is pierced?

There is no more buzzing in Lee’s pocket. His phone, at last, is silent. No one will miss him for days. No one knows where he is. Not his colleagues on holiday. Not his alcoholic boss. Not the receptionist with the gel nails. She’ll have gone home by now, or out, wherever she goes of a Friday night. Her office clothes look like nightclub clothes so it’s difficult to tell.

He pictures the reunion-goers in the beer garden at the pub, enjoying themselves without him. Up until this evening, he had no desire to be there, but now the scene in the beer garden takes on an unexpected lustre: he thinks of lanterns in the trees, faces turning towards his.

‘This’ll do,’ Kemp announces suddenly. He has Lee sit against a tree, takes out a coil of nylon rope and ties him securely to the trunk. He shakes his head as he knots the rope. In a voice full of regret, he asks, ‘Why did you have to say those things? About the barrister, the police?’