But: I still did not know what was happening. This man did not want a cigarette, I knew that; if he did, it certainly wasn’t all he wanted. Was I being begged? Was I being robbed? Was I simply free to go, to say, ‘No, sorry,’ and push by, suffering nothing more than an epithet spat at my retreating back? If I gave this man a quid – it was there, and more, heavy in my pocket – was that all? Would we part on good terms, with some of that spurious cheer that accompanies a successful beg? No – I was sure, on a level of animal instinct, that starting to fetch money from my pockets was a mistake.

It was confusing. There was no clarity in the situation. It didn’t look promising, but it wasn’t a man with a knife saying, ‘Give me all your money.’ There was no obvious, sensible path to either escape or self-preservation. That was the most frightening part.

‘You got a quid then, mate?’ Old-Young said. He stepped towards me. Aware of his colleague to my rear, I inched back, but did not take a corresponding full step. He drew closer. The streetlamp hardly grazed him.

‘Sure, sure,’ I mumbled, and dipped a hand into my pocket. My keys jangled with the loose change there. As it happened, I had an unusually large amount of money on me: £30 in notes and perhaps another ten in change. At the time, on my starting salary in a parsimonious industry, that was a lot. I had expected to need it for carousing, but the magazine had paid for everything at the restaurant, leaving me flush. He heard it.

‘You got a lot there, yeah?’ he said. ‘How about you spare us a bit more?’

I froze, looking desperately towards the busier street, hoping against all likelihood that a policeman or patrol car might choose this moment to pass, or that a large group might turn the corner and give me the cover, the witnesses, to extricate myself. But I was alone.

My next move surprised me – it was, I suppose, brave, or bold, and thus I had not anticipated it.

‘You said a quid.’

Old-Young lifted his gaze from mine to look at his companion – the first time he had acknowledged him, although I had never doubted they were working together. I shuddered, expecting an assault from behind – an arm round the throat, a blow to the back of the head, a knife between the ribs. How would that feel, to be stabbed? I had only really been thinking in words: ‘mugged’, ‘robbed’, ‘assaulted’, these were very elastic concepts, which had made fixing them to the truth of the situation all the harder – until now, anyway, and now they felt inadequate against a much larger and less abstract consideration: Am I about to be hurt, and if so, how much?