Tomorrow was Thursday. If I had a signed confession and a guarantee of cooperation in my bag on Thursday evening, I could take it to the meeting on Friday morning. It would be enough to appease the mob at work, for sure. And what would I have to do to get this guarantee? Spend another evening blundering about the streets with Pierce, observer to his increasing mania. Eyewitness to the unravelling. He was right, it did make for a great story. A real escapade. I was certain that no actual crime would take place. Tonight had been a fiasco. Did I have confidence that the stocky cult novelist before me could confront a stranger in the street and demand his wallet and phone? How, exactly? Nothing would happen.

Especially if I could make the pool of potential victims as small as possible.

‘We need to lay down some rules first,’ I said. ‘Get the right target, yes?’

‘Rules, yes,’ Pierce said. ‘Good.’

‘No women,’ I said. ‘Men only. Healthy, able-bodied, adult men.’

‘Absolutely,’ Pierce said. ‘Wouldn’t dream of anything else.’

I fixed him with a stare. ‘White men. You don’t want a racial component.’

‘I agree. Simple mugging. No hate angle.’

‘On the same score, heterosexual.’

Pierce frowned. ‘Well, that’s hard to guarantee.’

‘But if there’s any doubt or possibility—’

‘Well, now you’re being prejudiced. There is no way of telling.’

‘Fine. We’ll put a pin in that. And they have to deserve it. They have to be the right sort.’

‘This sort?’ Pierce said as Winterzone’s guests streamed past us towards the exit. The Renewosaurs had quieted for the night. ‘The streets around here must have potential right now …’

I winced, feeling once more a shard of pain in the circuit of my right eye as the damaged skin around it stretched and wrinkled. It was a complicated crowd. As a group, I might detest it – there was the abstract entity causing the harm, cheering the purgation of the city – but as individuals it was less obviously malign. The two men sitting nearest us, for instance, one wearing a shiny Moncler jacket, the other in a conspicuously moth-eaten Fruit of the Loom sweatshirt bearing the 1990s logo for Electronic Arts. What about them? Struggling artists or advertising executives? Private renters or owner-occupiers? And what if that mirror was held up to us? At least I didn’t look the part, I thought, with my injured face and court-appearance suit, my underlying pallor and shakes and emaciation. I had a 200-hours community-service look to me. Unless that could all be read as ironic, a carefully constructed pose – the guardians of Winterzone had let me through with barely a twitch, after all, apparently satisfied on sight that I wasn’t an ASBO graduate.

‘No,’ I said. ‘You can’t just charge off and try to get someone. You should have a clear idea of who merits the crime.’