‘Honestly,’ Pierce said, ‘I don’t know what happened that night.’ He had been silently tilting his beer while I fiddled with my phone, deep in thought, and this announcement came without preamble. It had been on his mind.

‘Describe it to me,’ I said. I still had to get the material for an interview, somehow. I needed to know.

‘You recording this?’ Pierce asked, nodding at my phone, which was cocked in my hand, screen lit.

I wasn’t, but I realised that I should be. More than the basic raw materials of the interview, the quotes, I needed proof of the fraud – I needed a recorded acknowledgement of the fraud, if not an outright statement of guilt. Pierce describing the actual turn of events, and how he decided to construct his tale, would do very well.

‘May I?’ I asked.

He rubbed his face with his free hand, pulling at the skin, like a man trying to rub away his tiredness.

‘I’d rather you didn’t,’ he said. Seeing my expression change, he added, ‘I know, I know, it’s just hard … it’s good to get this out in the open, but hard to … commit to it.’

As exhausted as I was by Pierce’s prevarication, I had some sympathy for the difficulty the truth could cause in a mind accustomed to deception and delusion.

‘You’ll have to commit eventually,’ I said. ‘If we’re going to do this, I can’t have the possibility of you turning around and saying this didn’t happen.’

Pierce was nodding. He had started nodding before I finished speaking. It was the kind of nodding that could be read as meaning: Yes, yes, shut up.

‘Honestly, I wish you’d trust me a bit,’ he said.

I wasn’t going to allow that. ‘You tried to blackmail me to get the story you want. Yesterday. You were sitting right there and I was sitting right here and you tried to blackmail me. In fact, I am being blackmailed, aren’t I? There’s still that threat? Just so we’re clear. Let’s not talk about trust.’

Pierce slumped. ‘Just trying to protect myself.’

I drained my beer. It had not lasted long.

‘Are you recording this, though?’

‘No.’

‘OK. Please don’t.’ He sprang out of his chair, walked over to the map on the wall, and started to pick at it, tweaking and adjusting its hide of notes and clippings as if grooming a pet. ‘Like I say, I don’t know what happened that night. I mean – on a crude, sensible level, I do know. I walked home. Nothing happened. I went to bed. But when I woke up – I couldn’t get out of bed.’

He turned his attention to the stack of foreign-language editions of his books that crowned one of the filing cabinets. The same basic imagery, reiterated by different graphic designers for different markets: London, violence, police.