I checked my watch. ‘Sure.’ I pulled out a chair and folded down onto it. Leaned over to see the screen.

Alexej keyed in the username he’d created, ‘LP5’, and had a click round the site. It used an old-fashioned, basic template, and was hosted with a cheap company in Canada. There were large blocks of plain colour and text, interspersed with a few generic skyline images. The menu was a string of topics to click on. ‘There’s no mission statement, no biographical information about key people.’ He looked at me. ‘The technicians are checking who the website is registered to.’

‘Very clever. The lack of biographical information makes it harder to find out who’s behind the site.’

Alexej signed into the forum. In LP5’s profile, several unopened envelopes indicated that we had correspondence. He clicked on the ‘welcome’ message and scrolled down to site rules.

‘Look.’ Alexej highlighted the text. ‘No mention of age.’

Another message asked us to sign up to a newsletter, and to enter an email address and mobile phone number.

‘I can’t believe people are willingly giving out this information.’ He was shaking his head.

Two messages were greetings from other users, and one was a reply to a message that Alexej had sent, asking about forthcoming flash mobs in London. It was from a user called ‘s10s’ and simply said: ‘yes very soon watch forum.’

From there, Alexej clicked through some of the discussion threads. A week before the fire, ‘Frazer’ had posted a notification of a flash mob gathering in Brick Lane. It gave the date of the event and stated ‘afternoon’. Ali had mentioned some brief information about anti-gentrification. However, no details about the protest’s aims were given, just a prompt to enter your contract details in another box. It was probably sent out via the follow-up once people had registered interest. It was the foot-in-the-door technique of asking for increasing commitment.

‘Sign up. See what happens.’

Alexej clicked on the link.

Too late, comrades!

Watch and listen

We need u

‘That’s interesting.’ I turned to Dan. ‘It looks basic but they’ve got it plugged into dates and times.’

A scan through some of the other discussion threads revealed three interesting facts. There were no posts from ‘Frazer’ since the day of the flash mob and fire. Ali and Sophie Williams were regular forum users. There was one new post:

s10s: who’s got stereo from 5/4 it’s mine

user9: feds

‘Post a reply. Say you have the stereo.’

Alexej typed:

‘It aint wiv feds i have it safe message me bro.’

‘Look,’ I said. ‘These forums are the contemporary equivalent of back-room meetings. They’re the perfect breeding ground for criminal activities. User-names are nonsense. Most people have non-human avatars.’