Long time ago now: long, long time. Dan sat at his desk, up in the eyrie, just a few minutes before 3 a.m., and allowed whisky-fuelled thoughts to cascade through his mind about the passing of time and its heedless, terrible speed. It was a shortcut to melancholy, but in the nick of time he remembered Willie Dundas, and he pulled the disc out of his jacket pocket and slid it into the CD player so that immediately his office was flooded with a guitar intro that made Dan smile: first, a single chord that hung in the air like a promise, then a quick-fingered bluesy riff and then Willie’s voice, low, mellow, impressionistic, laying down his lyrics with careless flair, as if he might be drunk, or barely had the energy to articulate them. It was a kind of genius, but Dan had been here before with Duncan’s finds; so full of artistic integrity that you couldn’t winkle them out of their fishing smacks, or their bedrooms, or their garden sheds. Dan let the music roll while he booted up the Mac for a quick, dutiful surf across Twitter, and he thought about Willie Dundas, singing on his herring boat in the North Sea, and wondered if he could be persuaded to sing in front of a room full of strangers at a place like Whistle Binkies.

Twitter bloomed bright blue on the screen in front of him, and a stream of tweets appeared in the feed, in all their self-referential glory. Twenty-eight notifications from people to whom Dan was barely connected. Seven direct messages from people he actually knew, but nothing that had to be dealt with at 3 a.m. You had to be careful not to appear unhinged, leaving replies in the small hours, under the influence of Laphroaig. He scrolled idly through the morass, with that glazed disengagement that Twitter always induced in him, and he was about to shut down and go to bed, when a new notification pulsed on to the screen. Kev Carter. Always worth reading Kev’s messages, whatever the time of day or night. Dan leaned in closer to the screen, then immediately retreated, as if he’d been slapped.