Suits and skirts streamed out of the function room. Some cast me glances, and I felt judged and wanting. The nausea had long subsided, replaced by a deep weariness.

Another message from Pierce: ‘Where are you?’

I hadn’t replied to any of these messages and I didn’t reply to this one.

The exodus slackened. A few stragglers hung on in the lobby, chatting or waiting for rides. Chairs clattered in the function room and staff shuttled in and out, removing trays of glasses and boxes of bottles. The PRs called to each other in happy, end-of-day voices, quite unlike their cultivated manner earlier.

Pierce, again, via Tamesis: ‘Never mind. Waiting.’ Was that anger? Melancholy? Genuine unconcern? Never mind what? I pictured him at home, staring at the map on his wall, phone hot in his hand, waiting to get word from me. It was a pathetic thought – whatever the reality of the situation, he clearly did not feel himself to be in the driving seat any more. My invocation of Quin had been magic. Never mind that Quin had no useful proof concerning Pierce’s fraud, Pierce clearly didn’t know that. Or Quin was lying, and did have something; something else, perhaps, some other form of leverage. It was possible. Quin was a man who knew things. And behind Quin was a clean, cold room where banks of servers hummed, panning for secrets in the silt of data that settled under the stream of our lives.

De Chauncey appeared, carrying four YOLO Shoreditch-branded gift bags, two in each hand. ‘I thought you might want one of these,’ he said, holding out a bag. ‘There’s some bumf about the project in there. And a pen, and a temporary tattoo, I think, which is fun.’

I mumbled my appreciation.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Fine, thank you,’ I said. ‘Much better. I don’t know what came over me.’

‘Ready to go?’

‘Sure.’

‘We’ll use one of the office cars. They’re parked just around the corner.’

I knew the cars he meant – they had been ubiquitous for a decade, zippy little Minis painted in psychedelic Wolfe / De Chauncey colours, forever parked on pavements and blocking pedestrian crossings. A couple of them, from the Pimlico branch, were left on my little street every night. They always had a visual joke – a driver’s door that looked like an X-ray of the driver from the chest down, a transfer in the passenger window so it looked as if they had Will and Kate in the back. I regularly had to fight the urge to run my key along the jaunty paintwork of those Minis.