The cocktail wasn’t very appealing once I got it back to my desk, but I drank it anyway, and without too much hesitation. Who was I trying to fool?

Quin had delivered, it couldn’t be denied. He had inserted me into the guest list for an event that afternoon, and De Chauncey would be present. But I couldn’t simply show up and start interviewing. I might not even be able to get close to the man. And leaving the office was a problem in itself. I was being watched. It would be very hard to explain to my jailers why I had to go to this event: as far as Eddie and Polly knew, the interview with De Chauncey was done already. That was the fiction that we were all role-playing, anyway: Eddie possibly knew the truth, or had suspicions, and was giving me the space to humiliate myself, to heap up lies until the whole edifice of deception collapsed with no way for me to escape from the wreckage. Tomorrow morning, it would come crashing down.

I sat at my desk, drinking from my bottle, planning my exit. The event began at 4 p.m., an afternoon tea, and it was close to the office, at Zebedee, a boutique hotel off Great Eastern Street. I could Mary Celeste it: hurry out wearing only my jacket, leaving my computer switched on with my pad and pen prominent nearby, my bag under my desk and my winter coat on the back of my chair. I might have gone to the toilet, or to make a sensitive phone call in the stairwell, which people did all the time. The chair was important: it mustn’t be tucked under the desk, but left sticking out, turned to one side, as if I might return at any moment. By the time my absence was noted and it became clear I wasn’t coming back, it would be the end of the working day. Easy.

Rain was falling in freezing sheets, and I wished I had my winter coat on, but it helped the illusion to leave it. Who would go out in this downpour without their coat? I pulled up my lapels, kept my head down and hurried along Old Street, sticking close to buildings. As I reached the steps down to the underpasses around the Tube station, I almost ran into a skulking object, and it responded with a burst of frenzied white wings. A cockatoo, taking flight! But no, a man rushing into the station, trying to shelter himself with a collapsing copy of the Evening Standard. I gave some thought to buying a cheap umbrella, but the damage was already done, and I feared the cumulative effect of the bruises on my face and my bedraggled, creased clothes.