Pierce’s ‘desk’ was a sturdy, wide slice of mdf slung between two filing cabinets. He had bought it from a timber yard up ahead, where the street took a sharp turn right. It would be easy to miss the yard, a modest wooden gate on the outer elbow of the turn. It had featured in Night Traffic as the only time Pierce had previously visited these streets: to buy the surface he wrote on. Was that the connection he made when he decided to invent the attack? A sheet of engineered wood, bought on a crooked street, making a work of engineered and crooked biography? I had to remember that he had not walked the streets exactly as he had described: it had all been a later invention, a tour as contrived as the one we were on now. More so. I pictured him sitting at that desk, Google Streetview open on the computer screen. Or standing on this corner on a quiet and pretty day, camera in one hand, notebook in the other, not revisiting a trauma at all, but smiling at his cleverness, at all the observations and linkages he would put into Night Traffic. It made me angry. Why, I don’t know. Was I a victim, really? A victim of fraud and deception? I had been cheated by Pierce, made to feel things under false pretences, impersonally lied to.

‘You still haven’t answered my question,’ I said. ‘Not really. When did you decide to write Night Traffic? To invent all this? What made you do it?’

Maddeningly, Pierce ignored me again. None of the street’s weak orange light reaching him, moonless introspection. How he was able to do this, I don’t know. Maybe people just accepted it – a novelist’s privilege, to be moody and inconsistent and elliptical.

‘That’s the cemetery,’ Pierce said.

Aged trees rose in a crowd behind the terrace, bare black branches untouched by light. A pool of blackness in the city.

To briefly recap Night Traffic: walking home on Eric Street, our hero is accosted by a gang of youths. Cheerful, reeking of skunk and violence, multi-ethnic. (Another stab of anger. I thought about Pierce composing the very balanced racial make-up of the group, being careful to include and not offend. A complete rainbow of bourgeois fear, no one left behind.) Once the group has impressed upon Pierce the seriousness of his situation, he is taken to the cashpoint of a nearby newsagent to withdraw his ransom. But the cashpoint is not working. So he is marched through these quiet streets in the direction of another. They are heading to a small Tesco across the road from Pierce’s own street – his own suggestion. But on the way, they detour into the cemetery to make a more thorough stocktaking of Pierce’s possessions and removables.