I awoke without having rested. It was as if I had bumped into an absent colleague’s desk and nudged their mouse enough to wake their computer, showing what they had been looking at when they were called away. That was the thought left over from the previous night: it’s a game. Or rather, it’s a mockery, a pantomime of reality. Lists of victims, signed confessions? These were the props of melodrama, not journalism. I had nothing. Two days had passed with Pierce and I had achieved nothing.

In the dim, dilute light of the basement morning, I knew that I was out of time. There was no additional day to work on getting useful material from Pierce – or from De Chauncey, and remembering De Chauncey brought on a fresh surge of panic. For a vertiginous second, sinking into the sweat-damp mattress, I feared that the day might already have passed – that I might have so thoroughly medicined myself on Wednesday night that I had awoken on Friday morning. I entertained this thought long enough for its positive side to appear: at least there would be no more delay, not another twenty-four hours of sticky, desperate delusion as I imagined I might yet heave my career out of the fire. Cut straight to the deadline.

But I had not been spared, not that way. The realisation that I was out of time came from elsewhere. The sound had ceased in the few unpleasant moments I had spent wondering what day it might be – the flat was quiet, but for the bickering of the builders outside. I sat up, and swung my feet out of bed. The room was cold, the central heating off already, the only part of the house that kept up the ridiculous fiction that I maintained a normal work schedule. Atomised brick and cement had accumulated in the corners of my eyes and the recesses of my mouth. How much had I swallowed in the night – how much did I swallow every night, since the neighbours started their improvements? Was it building up within me? Was I saving that kind of deposit? How benign would it be? I thought of asbestos, and the myriad other horrors that lurked in old houses: fibreglass, mycotoxins, mould, spores. Should I email Dave? What good would it do?