As she walks the short distance back to Somerset House, worrying that her source will not turn up, she thinks that she is now, for better or for worse, in the real world. When you are young, even when you are at college, you see life through gauze. What politicians proclaim, what multinationals do, what older people say and think, comes through a filter that removes the possibility that it applies to you or has any meaning for you. It’s just the white noise of a dimly perceived world, heard like the sound of a carousel over a hill. But now she’s walking – awkwardly, her classic skirt riding up – to meet a source, a snitch, a man with a grudge, a person from the unfamiliar other-world. The fountains in the middle of the piazza are throwing jets fifty or sixty feet into the air, rising and falling in rhythm against the grandeur of the buildings all around. The whole place speaks of urban sophistication, as though big cities belong to an elite club where art and public works and probably even journalism have a sensibility that doesn’t exist out in the provinces. She sees herself as one of those Austen heroines who leave the sticks to stay with the snobbish aunt in London, or a French heroine who departs some stunned, silent town for Paris, wearing the wrong bonnet and shawl. In her silly suit with the cheap shoes and clutching her pink see-through Ryman’s folder, she sees herself as a hick. Self-knowledge is painful, but there must be some redemption in recognising it: she’s a plump, badly dressed, underprepared amateur. A rube, as they say in those American novels they were taught at school. There are generations of British schoolchildren out there who have read Of Mice and Men and To Kill a Mockingbird.

She sits at a table on the terrace and looks around. She feels even more like a foreigner than the tourists who are wandering about, their children braving the narrow gaps between the fountains, the water rising and falling, in a game of chicken.

‘Hello,’ a voice says behind her. ‘Are you Melissa?’

She turns.

‘Alan?’

‘You’re very young.’

‘Sorry.’

He’s about forty or a little less, she guesses, wearing a grey suit and a blue spotted tie. His dark hair is thinning at the temples and the crown. He sits. They order some coffee. She hopes the toilet isn’t too far away; she’s becoming her mother. She takes out her notebook.

‘I need to ask you a few questions before I tell you anything. Is that all right with you?’ he says.

He has a private-school accent, with – perhaps – some London vowels, she thinks.

‘Of course.’

He’s nervous too, which helps; there is a faint line of sweat on his upper lip, although it’s not hot.

‘You work full-time for the Cornish Globe and Mail?’