Will leaves the house, half walking, half running. It’s a windless night. That at least is good, he thinks as he follows the beam of his phone’s light as it sweeps from side to side over the pavement and along the gutter. Utterly focused now, he has no trouble recalling the route he took home from Alfie’s, random though it was.

How many times did he check his phone on that walk? Surely that’s when he most likely dropped the note. But it’s an action like blinking, almost involuntary. Maybe he never checked his phone at all. He had other things to think about.

He’s out of breath and sensing defeat when he turns right on to Coast Drive, the short drag down to the seafront. The street lights glow, the ocean at the end of the road silent now. Cheap hotels are fly-postered with adverts for Halloween parties and Bonfire Night events. The traffic lights on to the beach road run through their ghostly cycle of red to green and back again, for the benefit of no one. The shattered remains of a whisky bottle twinkle as they’re caught in Will’s searchlight.

He stops dead. It was pitch dark when he walked up here earlier. He remembers now how he hadn’t seen the broken glass till he was on it, shards crunching beneath his trainers and the wheels of his bike. He’d stopped and checked the tyres for damage.

With the light of his phone.

Hope buzzes through him. Somehow, he knows he’ll find it here, whole seconds before he spies its crumpled form in the grating of a storm drain. It quivers in the air current like a frightened rodent. Will hurls himself in its direction, seizing it like a cricketer saving a ball from the boundary. He unfolds it, taking a moment to enjoy its familiarity.

The voices are barely raised to begin with. Were it not for the quiet of a sleeping town, he wouldn’t be able to hear them at all. Distinctively teenage, they sound initially like no more than a group enjoying themselves. Will can’t see anyone between him and the seafront, the sound emanating from behind one of the large buildings lining the road to the right.

Voices are raised. An obscenity is shouted. Something’s kicking off.

Will slinks up close to the concrete wall, out of the street lamp’s glare. There’s a panicked shout that cuts through the night. Female, almost certainly. Familiar, quite possibly. And then a guy’s voice. ‘Come on then,’ it shouts. The preamble to every punch-up of Will’s childhood, it is unmistakably Danny.

Will scans the buildings along that side of the road. There’s a red-brick office building, a multi-storey car park, a Romanian bakery, a newsagent’s, and finally a service road, before Brooklyn Mega Bowl with its neon blue-and-pink signs on the corner.