‘To “set the record straight”?’ Pierce said. ‘That was the expression Quin used. More than once. I had to “set the record straight”. As if everything is disordered now, crooked, and when I … If I go on the record it’ll all be properly arranged and neat and tidy. “The Record”! As if there’s a single, agreed text of the past somewhere, in a big ledger with metal clasps … Or in one of Quin’s servers, now, I suppose.’

He stopped, and stared out of the window, biting his lip, frowning, those hard eyes points of radiant darkness. ‘That’s shit. That’s a big pile of shit. You must see that. Everything would be blown to shit. There’ll be a big storm of shit. Newspapers. I’ll be ripped apart.’

The eyes were avoiding me now, and they swam. For the first time in our discussion, he looked vulnerable. Might he cry? Profile gold …

‘The worst part,’ Pierce continued, ‘is that it won’t even be that big a scandal. Not the front page of the newspaper, it won’t touch the TV. Enough to destroy me, of course. A couple of days of it online, before people move on. I’ll be ruined. But it won’t be that important a story. Just enough to ensure I never come back.’

He was right I had not fully calculated the implications of what Pierce had said about Night Traffic – I had been thinking purely in personal terms, not about the wider world. I had thought, This is a huge story, but not put any real imagination into what that meant. This would bump Eddie’s estate agent friend for sure. Eddie might want it on the cover. Pierce was right, national newspapers would pick it up. The magazine’s name would be everywhere, we’d be at our highest profile for years, maybe since the Errol days. Money would flow: extra news-stand sales, new subscribers, extra ads sold against my piece, syndication rights. In narrow professional terms, I would be a hero. My dismissal would be off the table for a while, six months maybe, enough time for me to get my act together. And the incredible fact was that the story had just dropped from the sky. Quin volunteered Pierce, and Pierce had served up the story.

A wisp of doubt. I hadn’t actually done anything, not yet. I could imagine the finished product: long, New Yorker-ish, bringing in a lot of voices, well-researched, prize-winning. But it had been months since I put words on paper, and that had been the Quin train-wreck. Could I produce 5,000 words of empathy, careful questioning, supporting quotes, legal niceties and meticulous fact-checking? Lawyers would read it, tens of thousands of people would read it, awards judges would read it. I could imagine having written it – stepping onto the stage to accept my award – but I couldn’t imagine actually writing a single line.