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.

‘I ran into him,’ I said, trying not to sound guilty. On a technical level, I was pretty sure I had nothing to feel guilty about, but guilt came anyway. ‘I went into a pub for a quiet drink on my way home, and he came in a few minutes later.’

‘What an amazing coincidence,’ Pierce said, eyes wide, cartooning innocence. ‘Tamesis knew where you were, I suppose?’

‘Yes, I used it to find the pub.’

Pierce stared at me, smiling, knowing. I had put together these ‘coincidences’ myself. I could readily imagine what Quin had done, but I still could not quite face the reality that he would misuse his own software like that. Why I couldn’t, I don’t know.

‘Happens a lot around Quin,’ Pierce said, ‘that kind of co-incidence. If I was still writing journalism I might be more interested in that.’ He gazed deep into his bitter.

‘Perhaps, in the piece, we can expose some of Quin’s involvement,’ I said. ‘Since he’ll no longer have any hold over you.’

‘Perhaps,’ Pierce said. ‘I don’t relish the idea of making an enemy of him, mind. What did he want to talk about, anyway? Me, right?’

Partial truth. ‘I don’t remember. But yeah, a bit about you. I think he might simply have been trying to mess with me.’