I stopped the recording. ‘You have to go on the record.’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘What’s it going to take?’ I said, feeling anger flash up inside me. ‘I could just write a story without your cooperation.’ Pierce raised his eyebrows at this, taunting, daring. I felt the scorch in my lungs, in my throat. ‘I could go to Quin,’ I said, not really thinking, but I was rewarded with an immediate change in Pierce’s whole demeanour. ‘Yeah … Quin knows something, doesn’t he? He has information.’

Pierce blanched. ‘Don’t do that.’

I had no actual desire to go to Quin, and ensnare myself further with him, but I realised that Quin’s Tamesis post about me had materially shifted the balance of power between me and Pierce, and Pierce knew it. It was satisfying, at last, to have some traction. ‘What does Quin know, anyway?’ I said. ‘How did he figure it out?’

‘He didn’t,’ Pierce said. ‘I’m sure he would have – he was quizzing me about what happened. I don’t know. I told him the truth. I couldn’t stand it any more.’

The patio heater was enough to make me uncomfortable in my winter coat, but Pierce shivered in his. His eyes flicked from point to point, mostly downwards: ground, barrel, bottle, phone. ‘It’s become so complicated in my mind,’ Pierce said. ‘I thought that a single night could be kept separate from everything else. That what I put there could be sealed up. But it has spilled, and it keeps spilling out, everywhere …’

Like the plume, I thought. An uncontrollable reaction, spewing poison into the air, into the water, toxifying all it touched. And instinctively I searched for smoke in the dark sky, and there it was to the east, a rolling wall of mobile night, tanned by ten thousand streetlights. Closer, again? We had travelled a good distance west as well as south when we came here, away from the fire. And yet, if anything, I could have sworn it was closer. But London is curved: the bends of the river, the scoop of its wide valley, have distorting effects, so that what you imagine to be east is to the north, or two areas you believed to be far apart are in fact close together.

No need to share any of this with Pierce. ‘I’ve found the same thing,’ I said instead. ‘Tell enough lies, or a big enough lie, and the truth gets corrupted. The boundary gets lost, it rots.’

Pierce narrowed his eyes at me. ‘Right,’ he said. ‘So the falsehood corrodes what’s true. The true feels false. But what happens to the lies? Does their nature change as well?’

I tried to look attentive and sympathetic – an interviewer face – but I didn’t follow what Pierce was saying. I let the silence open up, hoping he might elaborate.