He wouldn’t have given Carole King the time of day when he was eighteen. But what a lovely track Ali had sent, what a masterclass in deceptive simplicity; he’d listened to it on the train and been blindsided by the emotional tug of her lyrics on his cynical, heard-it-all heart, because it was Ali Connor, Alison, that long-lost girl, speaking to him through this song, like solace for a pain he hadn’t known he had. Jesus, he’d thought; this was crazy. This was bad. In a good, good way. He’d listened three times to the track, wrung out from it every possible shade and nuance, then responded by sending M. Ward’s cover of ‘Let’s Dance’, for the mesmerising poetry of those reinvented Bowie lyrics and – there was no escaping the truth of this – the stripped-back, aching desire. She was ten thousand miles away; where was the harm?

After he’d sent it, he listened to nothing at all, and found he couldn’t write either, or read. Katelin had rung, and they talked about Christmas, his family, who would sleep where, what they would eat, an easy conversation about the real world. But he wanted to talk to Alison Connor. He wanted his phone to ring again, and it be her.

He’d stared blindly at the landscape as the train carved a path north, and let his thoughts travel to Sheffield in the bleak, black summer of 1979, and to what happened that night in July, and what he might have done differently. He thought about Duncan, and his misguided fling, unrelated and incomparable in Dan’s mind to his own feelings for Alison. He thought about Katelin, her brittle, implacable sense of right and wrong, and he thought about love in its many guises, and about loyalty, and trust. But time and again his thoughts swept back to Alison Connor, and where this was all leading, and whether he could see her again, and if so, how, and how soon. These songs were incredible, each new track the highlight of his day; but he wanted to talk to her, and he wanted to hold her again; that was all.