‘Plausible, yeah. I’m not playing the victim, mind. I fucking hate that, I know life’s been good to me – the city, this city, it’s been good to me, it opened up to me and embraced me.’ As he said this, the lights turned to green, a nod of agreement from the silent giant. ‘And I guess it just hasn’t for that bloke. On drugs, do you think?’

‘Obviously not well,’ I said.

‘If it hadn’t been me, it would have been someone else, maybe someone who didn’t deserve it.’

‘The mugging?’

De Chauncey flashed a frown at me. ‘What? No. Success. Anyway, he sees the car, the suit, he thinks … he gets it wrong. It’s not the whole story, anyway. Maybe that’s how we should do this piece? Get away from all that front, all that performance, all that Apprentice bullshit. Because, you know, it worries me. I’m not blind to it. The mood’s changing.’

‘Yeah, maybe,’ I said. And he was right, that was a great angle. All of it. But it didn’t really matter.

Perhaps he had gone to the police after all; perhaps that was them outside now. With considerable effort, I turned my head towards the window. The curtains were closed. All was quiet, but there was something, something in the light, a bluish flicker …

A long, low groan sounded. At first I thought I might have made the sound, but it had come from the fabric of the house. These Victorian terraces made many mysterious noises, mostly when the central heating switched off and they started to cool down.

I snapped from miserable reverie, mind half in last night, to fully awake. If the central heating was off, I was late – late for the Friday meeting, late for the unmissable, utterly mandatory Friday meeting. I snatched up the bedside clock and stared at its treacherous little face. It was a few minutes after nine o’clock. I was late, and more than a little late, but not unsalvageably. If I left immediately, I could be at work at about ten – and possibly the meeting wouldn’t have started yet, and I could squeak in.

Urinating in the bathroom, I saw that a crack had appeared in the white-tiled wall behind the toilet cistern, fresh and sharp-edged, running along the grout lines in between the tiles. When had that happened? The place was coming apart. I made a mental note to email Dave – and remembered, a sickening rising bubble, that there was no Dave, just a few thousand lines of software. Software with the power to evict me. What could I say to log the repair without triggering the termination of my tenancy? What were the words or phrases to include, or avoid? Was this the future, then – trying to second-guess the machines overseeing our fate?