‘You say dishonest, I say disruptive,’ he said. ‘It gives people what they want. Tenants are a group with very low expectations. As they should be. The software manages that, as well; it records the number and tone of complaints, balances that against the cost of setting things right, and when a threshold is reached, it triggers eviction. We’ve automated the hardest job a landlord has to do. Such a difficult decision, and we’ve taken it entirely out of human hands. The emotional labour, and its drag on investment value, is eliminated. You can imagine the peace of mind that creates, knowing that you won’t have to deal with a situation of that sort. Beautiful.’

‘For the owners,’ I said. The journalist’s temporary access to the higher lifestyles might look, at times, like corruption – at times, it is corruption. But it also has a strange camouflaging effect. The gilded ones who dwell in the Zebedee hotel, who don’t have to give their names to the clipboards, can mistake you for a more elevated element, simply because you are in their space – an owner among owners. They would never guess your actual salary, your actual living arrangement. They would be appalled.

I didn’t want to do the interview any more. Damn Eddie and Polly. I had the Pierce story, almost, I could make something out of that. But what would be the point? Another month’s salary into the bank, to be electronically deducted hours later to whatever Cayman Islands vault lay behind the artfully demotic syntax of ‘Dave Stockton’. The sickness wasn’t just in me, it was all around, in my bank account, at work, in the shaking walls of my flat. It had spread out into the world. Like the Need, in fact – it had the same cold implacability to it. Shutting down the options. One deathly Need had revealed another: the need to work at all costs and make rent, the impossibility of stopping or pausing.

On instinct, I glanced up at the plume. I hoped it was serious, that it was spreading, that it took the whole city away. We had been walking at speed through the maze between Great Eastern Street and Old Street. It was a place I knew intimately, but it was as if the storm and the winter darkness had washed the familiarity from it, made it featureless and dead. I had to take time to fix myself in space, but somehow the plume was exactly where I looked, just over the next line of dark Victorian attic windows. It churned and toiled and looked back at me. Smoke without fire.

All week I had seen it as the result of something that had happened. A tragedy, far but near, that had a beginning and continued and would end.

Now I saw that it was the sign of something yet to happen. It was not moving towards me. I was moving towards it.