Where am I most at risk from street crime? I tried, as we were driven through the dark, hissing streets.

Tamesis came up with advice for avoiding street crime. And it was what you’d expect: stick to busy, well-lit areas, use licensed cabs, don’t go alone. That was what was said about victims of crime – it has been said about me, to me: ‘In the wrong place at the wrong time,’ as if the crime were spring-loaded and waiting to happen in a particular location, like a mousetrap. Actually hunting for that location revealed the notion as absurd. Could we invite the crime, somehow attract it? I realised how this whole enterprise would take on an entirely different complexion if one or both of us was female. Or if we were a gay couple, holding hands. Those were the sections of the population who were skilled at making crime happen, out of thin air, to themselves. The crime whisperers. I realised that there was simply no way that we would be doing this if either of us was a woman. And the entire endeavour seemed abruptly more foolish, even grotesque: a peacock display of privilege. Look at us, male and white and hetero, from good-enough neighbourhoods – we can’t even get mugged in this town.

Did Pierce get that? I doubted it, though he was sensitive to some of the delicacies around the subject. In Night Traffic he had been scathing about the asking-for-it myth: You’re never a victim-in-waiting, nothing is preordained. You don’t have it coming. I was in no mood to give him credit, but this was one thing that Pierce got dead right in that book: the alchemy of it, the near-random collision of factors that transmuted part of the mostly benign city into a moment of terror.

Pierce was sitting in the front passenger seat, chatting with the driver. More than chatting: bonding. They were roaring away like old friends. The driver was Estonian; Pierce had been to Tallinn on a British Council jolly a couple of years before. I suspected that if I tried to impress the native of a place with impressions of their home picked up from a six-day jaunt, I would crash and burn in a firestorm of condescension and naivety, but of course Pierce was navigating it beautifully. They talked about the British stag parties that had besieged the city, and then they moved on to the Baltic ferries used by Swedish teens to get shitfaced, and of course Pierce knew a Vice writer who had been on one of those, and he had stories, and the driver snorted and yelped with laughter so much I feared we might come off the road. I hated them both.