‘Just you and me now,’ Dan said to the dog. He put the coffee pot on in the kitchen and switched on the radio, retuning it with some satisfaction to 6 Music from the wall-to-wall dialogue of Katelin’s preferred Radio 4. Huey Morgan immediately joined him in the room, his Lower East Side drawl taking Dan straight back in time to a basement club in St Mark’s Place, mid-nineties, tiny stage, banging music, sticky floor, dim red lights, a long night of revelry with the Fun Lovin’ Criminals. God, they’d tied one on that night. Every time he heard Huey on the radio he could smell fresh fried donuts, yet he couldn’t recall eating any at the time. The theory of Proust’s madeleines gone awry.

He poured himself a coffee and climbed the stairs to his office, McCulloch panting along valiantly behind him, in a house that was filled with a new and very welcome silence. Upstairs, the dog flung himself on to his blanket and Dan switched on the Mac and pulled Twitter on to his screen, to check out @AliConnorWriter, see what she’d been saying, which turned out to be nothing, as, to be honest, was often the case. He got the distinct impression she was part of this particular social media circus at the insistence of a publicist, or her publisher, because her heart clearly wasn’t in it. The last tweet from her had been a couple of weeks ago, raving about a young singer in Adelaide, and Dan had googled her – Tahnee Jackson, he loved that name, that name alone could earn her a record deal, but she was a songbird too, and beautiful, exotic, different.

He tapped the direct message icon, and scooted quickly through their thread of songs, fourteen so far, very few in the scheme of things, yet look where it had led him: right back to her, so that she was now his daily waking thought. Where she was, how she was, who she was – these were his obsessions. He’d lined up a track for her by Richard Hawley, a Sheffield bloke with a great line in nostalgic yearning, which seemed to fit the bill. He sent ‘Open Up Your Door’, and hoped she’d get the connection, because every album this guy made honoured their city, and his music was gorgeous, you could dissolve at the sound of his voice. Then he thought: Right, OK, flights to Adelaide, but still somehow dragged his feet, because, well, it was a mighty leap from brilliant concept to hard reality, and although he knew for sure he was going to go – and without telling her, so she didn’t have a chance to scarper – he just needed to think it through: the distance, the deceit, his chances of success, the vast, yawning, unknowable abyss of the future.