The fabrications in Night Traffic were set against a background of established fact. Pierce had been to a party, the launch of a friend’s book, and had drunk a good deal. Not as much as me on an average night, but a good deal for a civilian. Another friend, who lived further east, out in Leyton, had called a minicab, and had offered to drop Pierce along the way. They had expected to leave the centre via Whitechapel Road, which would ultimately pass by the end of Pierce’s street. But the driver had instead chosen Commercial Road. It had been a warm night, and rather than argue and demand a detour, Pierce had asked to be dropped at the bottom of Burdett Road, a long connecting street, intending to walk the rest of the way home. He was cheerful from drink and friendship. I remembered nights like those. Halfway, he deviated from the main road into a side street, trying to shave a minute or two off the walk.

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.