This much was real. The party had happened, the cab-ordering friend was real, the cab was real, the chronology to that point was easy to verify and check. So that was what we would do.

I napped for a while before going out, the fog of horror at the loss of the recordings having manifested as a terrible tiredness. The alarm on my phone woke me at seven, and I was sure that I would have slept on without it. Changing into the jacket and tie that Pierce had mandated was an ordeal of heavy, aching limbs. Everything had frozen in place on the sofa, held with an aching frost, and moving shattered me anew. In the mirror, I studied the damage to my face. It had lost some of its delicatessen rawness and was adding smoky purple bruising at its edges and in the lower pocket of the eye. Tomorrow morning there would be some explaining to do in the office, if I made it in. The shirt and tie made it look worse, somehow. A bookie’s clerk on the wrong side of a gang, a low-rung City sort after a fracas in an Essex nightclub.

I took some Stella on the Tube, poured into an aluminium water bottle I used to take to the gym. It held almost two cans, good for most London journeys. Anything to clear the sluggishness, the soggy fatigue in my bones.

Pierce was waiting for me in a pub beside Limehouse Station – almost underneath the station, beneath the elevated line I had spent so much time on yesterday. He greeted me like a friend, springing up from his seat, gripping my hand, patting me on the shoulder. Just thirty-six hours earlier, this would have delighted me, but now it was disquieting. Energy crackled around him, a bright photo-negative to my lethargy. He was on edge, volatile, and I wondered if he had taken something, either licit or illicit. It could simply be adrenalin.

‘What happened to your face?’

I decided to give the truth a go. ‘I was trying to get a plastic bag out of a tree in my back garden, and I fell.’

‘Last night?’

‘This afternoon.’

Pierce examined me. ‘I thought maybe Quin had beaten you up.’

This stopped me. It was said without malice, but the fact that Pierce knew about my encounter with Quin meant I had to adjust the pieces on the game board in my head. If, that is, he did really know – could this be a joke that doubled as a lucky guess? I had assumed that Pierce’s disappearance from social media meant that he no longer looked at it, but that was not necessarily true. My accounts, and Quin’s accounts, were all public, anyone could see them. Pierce might have anonymous accounts of his own for quietly keeping tabs on things. I thought of that rush of unfamiliar followers over the past twenty-four hours.

‘You saw that?’ I asked.

Pierce nodded.