A police siren whooped – the one-off attention-grabbing whoop, not the continuous call. All three of us in the alley jumped, and I looked towards the road. I was afraid again, afraid that the way out would be blocked by the fluorescent flank of a patrol car and strobing blue lights, afraid that Pierce would be arrested and there would be questions, and answers, there would be the truth. But no car appeared.

Pierce wasn’t risking it. He turned and ran, making surprising speed for a sedentary man his age and build.

I was left alone with De Chauncey amid the trickling rain.

‘Jesus,’ De Chauncey said.

We were quiet a moment, and unmoving.

‘I thought he was going to, for a moment,’ De Chauncey said. The colour had gone from his face. He shook his head. ‘Look, I … let’s do the talking another time. The questions. Not sure I can focus right now. I’ll drive, but … Jesus. I can’t do it right now.’

‘That’s fine,’ I said. It didn’t seem to matter.

ELEVEN

A squawk of siren roused me. My eyes were open at once, my body rigid, and I waited for the next noises: car doors slamming, the chuckle of radios, heavy shoes on the concrete steps down to my flat, gloved knuckles banging on the front door.

De Chauncey had not wanted to contact the police. ‘What would they do?’ he asked me. ‘It was just one of those things.’ These words were spoken with no bravado; on the contrary, De Chauncey made no effort to disguise how shaken he was. We spoke little when the drive home began, but around King’s Cross the silence had become uncomfortable. A backwash of the fright, I guess, the reabsorbed adrenalin making us voluble.

‘I don’t want to rake over it all again with the police,’ he said, as if it had happened years before, not twenty minutes ago.

‘I reckon you’re probably right,’ I said. Naturally I didn’t want to encourage De Chauncey to involve the police.

‘The police won’t do anything anyway,’ De Chauncey said. We had been caught by a succession of red lights, and the car rarely moved faster than its thumping windscreen wipers. He started to count off the reasons for his assertion, raising fingers off the steering wheel one by one, little finger first. ‘One, no one hurt. Two, nothing taken. Three, no CCTV.’

‘No CCTV?’ I said, hoping no secret rejoicing showed through a poker face. ‘That’s a shame.’

‘We keep telling the landlord, but …’ De Chauncey said. ‘He’ll be long gone by now, anyway.’ Evidently I was not the person that he was trying to convince. ‘He saw the car and thought he’d try it on. Just a passing scumbag.’