Melissa Tregarthen is on a train reading At Swim-Two-Birds, Artair MacCleod’s favourite. She’s seen him once, on one of her increasingly rare visits to her parents. She lives in London now, at London Fields. She’s making notes. She likes to be prepared.

One beginning and one ending for a book is a thing I did not agree with. A good book may have three openings entirely dissimilar and interrelated only in the prescience of the author or for that matter one hundred times as many endings.

People talk about true stories. As if there could possibly be true stories; events take place one way and we recount them the opposite way.

I mean to say, said Lamont, whether a yarn is tall or small, I like to hear it well told. I like to meet a man who can take a hand to tell a story and not make a balls of it while he’s at it. I like to know where I am, do you know. Everything has a beginning and an end.

Melissa wonders: can a story really have many beginnings and a hundred endings? The beginning and the end, she sees, are arbitrary. If the new government hadn’t come in, determined to prove that it would not show special favour to the City, the ending to this story would have been different. If the editor hadn’t died in St Stephen’s Hall of the House of Commons, waiting to give his evidence, things would have been different again. And if the editor had not taken the precaution of sending all his documents to every Member of Parliament, the Financial Services Agency, the Bank of England and the financial editors of the major newspapers, the Financial Services Agency would not have mounted an exemplary dawn raid on insider traders and stock manipulators in three banks and two stockbroking houses. These raids demonstrated what everybody knew, that many City people had not learned the lessons of the past few years.

The train is following, for the moment, the course of the Thames. The countryside looks untroubled, unaware, eternally indifferent.

Melissa works for a free newspaper, writing mostly about lifestyle matters. She has lost seven kilos and she has appeared a few times in tele­vision discussions about City corruption, but has been careful to limit her contribution to her own experience and anyway the recession is fading in the memory, both of the people and of the television companies.