Here it comes, I thought. I wondered if I should be recording the call, in preparation for a more hostile unauthorised article, or even to protect myself in court. This thought made me remember my voice recorders – and I was again skewered by panic. Had I laid eyes on either of my DVRs today? I had not. Where were they, post-bender? Where was Pierce’s confession? A wisp of data on an inexpensive storage device in a bag lugged about town by an erratic drunk – that was all that was supporting my career.

‘Go on,’ I said, dizzy once more, the grey curling in.

‘Well – first of all I want to apologise,’ Pierce said. His words, these and the following, sank in slowly, taking time to deposit meaning in me. ‘I behaved pretty badly yesterday. Rude, I mean. Putting you on the spot like I did, all that … I don’t know … I don’t want to say blackmail. It’s not like that. But I put a lot of pressure on you.’

‘Uh-huh,’ I said.

‘I’m pretty stressed about all this,’ Pierce continued. ‘You know, Night Traffic. Quin pushing me, messing with me.’

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Quin’s, uh, Quin is …’ But I didn’t have anything to finish that with.

‘The truth is, I really am determined to set the record straight, to come clean – Christ, why is everything about this such a cliché? I don’t know – to confess, to tell the truth, to make amends – to atone, that’s it, that’s the literary word. I want to atone. And I think you’re the guy to tell that story.’

‘OK,’ I said. I felt as if I had to clear an obstacle course in my head to get a full sentence together. ‘That’s really great to hear.’

‘Something you said yesterday really stayed with me,’ Pierce said. Again he had the practised manner that I had noticed during our interview; he had thought through what he was saying, rehearsed it. ‘You said that when people find out about Night Traffic they’re going to be angry – they’ll want to see me get beaten up.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I mean—’

‘That’s it exactly,’ Pierce said. ‘What I was avoiding – the part I can’t avoid. So let’s do it. I can balance things out, show that I understand what I did wrong and that I want to put it right.’

A weird thought occurred to me as I tried to figure out what Pierce meant by this. But it couldn’t be right.

‘I need to get beaten up,’ Pierce said.

I had been right.

‘I’m going to get violently mugged,’ Pierce said. ‘The worse the better. And you’re going to watch.’

SEVEN