That was enough. He put his camera away and took out his mobile. Speaking quietly into his phone’s dictation app, he’d described the scene: the pack mentality of the crowd, reacting to one another as much as to the tragedy of the human condition taking place above them. The apparent calm of the emergency services as they constructed perimeters and prepared for the worst while maintaining an impressive air of assuming that nothing bad was actually going to happen. And the occasional chilling wail from the poor woman suffering so terribly above.

Then a man had pushed through the crowd, laughing. Lance didn’t catch his face, but the body language was all arrogance and youth. In his twenties, swaggering with the lack of realisation that he, too, would die someday. And that before that – if he was lucky – he’d live through the steady decline of his body, the weakening bladder, clicking knees and eyes that only focused on the small print with your arms held out straight in front of you, as if you were driving some imaginary cartoon car.

The laughing male pulled his hoodie up as Lance turned round to share some advice about common decency with him that would inevitably fall on deaf ears, but sometimes in life the attempt to do the right thing was worth more than the realistic prospects of success. Laughing Boy was a little over six foot but thin and his clothes were a brand currently worn by every social media-obsessed youth. In his hand he clutched his mobile, the picture on the screen changing as he walked, and Lance realised the man’s camera was on.

So that was the game. Attend at a possible suicide. Make sure you’re ready to catch all the action. Then presumably post it on some site with no responsible policing at all and wait to see the hits roll in. Other Internet stars had sought to get followers under similar dubious circumstances and ended up in trouble for it, but not before their fame had reached what for them must have seemed dizzying heights. Not too difficult to comprehend how you could be tempted to the dark side by the thought of all that adulation. The problem was natural justice. At some point, you had to grow up, and the idea of spending the remainder of your days knowing you’d livestreamed a suicide would get more painful with each passing year.