“What news?” said Sprake.

Suddenly he pointed out a display of flowers on the pavement in front of a florist’s. “I thought those were wreaths,” he said, with a bleak laugh. “Sombre though colourful,” he added. After that, his mood improved, but he kept saying, “News!” under his breath in a contemptuous fashion until they reached the offices of MVC-Kaplan, which were hushed, warm and empty at the end of the working day.

Gordon Meadows had begun his career in gene-patenting then, after a series of high-profile drug launches for a Swiss-based pharmaceuticals house, moved laterally and with ease into money. He specialised in ideas, kickstarts, original research. His style was to blow a pure, weightless bubble: boost capitalisation, float, talk the stock up, and profit-take a stage or two before the product was due onstream. If you didn’t get that far, he dumped you for what he could get. As a result, Meadows Venture Capital had the whole of a curious bolted-glass structure which glittered uneasily between the tailored alloy façades of a Walthamstow “excellence” park; and no one remembered Kaplan, a puzzled highbrow who, unable to meet the challenge of free market thinking, had returned only briefly to molecular biology before becoming a teacher in a Lancashire comprehensive.

Meadows was tall and thin, with a kind of willowy fitness. When Kearney first knew him, fresh from his pharmaceutical triumphs, he had favoured the merciless saffron haircut and goatee of the internet entrepreneur. Now he wore suits from Piombo, and his workspace—which had a grim view of trees along the towpath of the old Lea Valley Navigation—seemed to have been furnished from an issue of Wallpaper. B&B Italia seating faced a desk made from a single slab of re-melted glass, on which stood, as if they had something to do with one another, a Mac Cube and Sottsass coffee pot. This he sat behind, eyeing Valentine Sprake with a cautious amusement.

“You must introduce us,” he told Kearney.

Sprake, who had worked himself up into a fever in the lift, now stood with his face pressed up against the glass wall of the building, staring down at two or three lumps of packing material the size of refrigerators, floating along the canal in the gathering twilight.

“Let’s talk about him later,” recommended Kearney. “He’s got a great idea for a new drug.” He sat on the end of Meadows’s desk. “Brian Tate is worried about you, Gordon.”

“Is he?” said Gordon. “I’m sorry if that’s so.”

“He says you’re progress-chasing. He’s worried that you’re going to sell us to Sony. We don’t want that.”

“I think Brian is—”

“Shall I tell you why we don’t want that, Gordon? We don’t want that because Brian’s a prima donna. You’ve got to show confidence in a prima donna. Try this thought-experiment.” Kearney held up his hands, palms uppermost. He looked at the left one. “No confidence,” he said, and then, looking at the right one, “no quantum computer.” He repeated this pantomime. “No confidence, no quantum computer. Are you intelligent enough to see the connection here, Gordon?”