Pierce rolled his eyes. ‘You know that stuff they used to put in shower gel? I think they’ve banned it. These little particles, little grains of plastic. It was always called, I don’t know, “dermabrasion microbeads” and I guess most people thought it was pumice or pulverised seashells or something, but it wasn’t, it was plastic, tiny specks of plastic. All this plastic going straight down the plughole, into rivers, into the ocean. Fish eating it. Seabirds eating it. It was poisoning everything. Those big swirling garbage patches in the oceans, they’re not all Lucozade bottles and Ninja Turtles, most of it is this plastic dust that is almost too small to see. But it’s choking up everything. Anyway, that’s what I think of when I read a lot of writing about London: synthetic grit. Plastic that makes you feel a little better for a moment or two, a little invigorated, and then it poisons the world.’

This reminded me of a few passages from Night Traffic – Pierce had written about sitting in his flat after the attack, surrounded by novels and non-fiction about the gritty, grimy, real city having just encountered genuine crime, and feeling that he was surrounded by fraud, including his own work – especially his own work.

‘You talk about that in Night Traffic, don’t you? About craving an authentic experience in the city, something not commercial and not nostalgic, not packaged, but real …’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ Pierce said, although there wasn’t much in his reply that was affirmative. Instead he appeared embarrassed, with those broad shoulders still hunched forward, staring into his coffee as if he expected the cadaver of a family member to come bobbing to its surface. ‘That, that’s what I wanted to do.’

I tried not saying anything – that old trick of barristers and psychotherapists – to see if he volunteered more information, but nothing came. The DVR recorded the silence of the room, the small sounds of the leather seats, a muted police siren from the direction of the main road. This was going exactly the way that Freya had predicted: he simply did not have anything new to say, and was unwilling to return to subjects he had talked about in the past. A few quotes about a years-old book and abandoned projects weren’t going to be enough, and not enough time had elapsed for this to be a Whatever-Happened-To piece, all melancholy thoughts about the fleeting nature of fame and the callous muse. Those weren’t the magazine’s style, anyway: Eddie wanted fresh, up-and-coming, ahead of the curve, stylish. Not worn-out artists and their sadsack regrets. It’d be ten pages on De Chauncey, then, about his suits and his cars and the secrets of his success.