“It’s like it’s pulling you out, isn’t it?” he says. He sighs to himself. Like a girl. “I saw this old man on my way in this morning. He was sitting at a bus stop listening to an iPod, tapping his hands on his knees, looking at the sky. How often do you see that? An old man listening to an iPod. I wonder what he was listening to. You’d think it would be classical, but it could have been anything. I wonder if it was sad music.” He lifts up his feet and crosses them on top of a table. “I hope it wasn’t.”

“Sad music is okay,” I say, “in moderation.”

He swivels round to me and straightens his tie.

“You are definitely Victoria Spring, aren’t you.” This should be a question, but he says it like he’s already known for a long time.

“Tori,” I say, intentionally monotone. “My name is Tori.”

He laughs at me. It’s a very loud, forced laugh. “Like Tori Amos?”

“No.” Pause. “No, not like Tori Amos.”

He puts his hands in his blazer pockets. I fold my arms.

“Have you been in here before?” he asks.

“No.”

He nods. “Interesting.”

I widen my eyes and shake my head at him. “What?”

“What what?”

“What’s interesting?” I don’t think I could sound less interested.

“We both came looking for the same thing.”

“And what is that?”

“An answer.”

I raise my eyebrows. He gazes at me through his glasses. The blue eye is so pale it’s almost white. It’s got an entire personality of its own.

“Aren’t mysteries fun?” he says. “Don’t you wonder?”

It’s then that I realise that I probably don’t. I realise that I could walk out of here and literally not give a crap about solitaire.co.uk or this annoying, loud-mouthed guy ever again.

But because I want him to stop being so goddamn patronising, I swiftly remove my phone from my blazer pocket, type solitaire.co.uk into the Internet address bar and open up the web page.

What appears almost makes me laugh – it’s an empty blog. A troll blog, I guess.

What a pointless, pointless day this is.

I thrust the phone into his face. “Mystery solved, Sherlock.”

At first, he keeps on grinning, like I’m joking, but soon his eyes focus downwards on to the phone screen and, in a kind of stunned disbelief, he removes the phone from my hand.

“It’s … an empty blog …” he says, not to me but to himself, and suddenly (and I don’t know how this happens) I feel deeply, deeply sorry for him. Because he looks so bloody sad. He shakes his head and hands my phone back to me. I don’t really know what to do. He literally looks like someone’s just died.