The officer formed a leather-clad fist with his left hand and was massaging it with his right like a child forming a snowball. He spoke as if he had answered the same question twenty times already.

‘I don’t know if you gentlemen have noticed, but’ – the right hand released the left and gestured, open, towards the plume – ‘there’s a rather serious fire going on over there. So no one is just anything anywhere this way. The road. Is closed.’

‘We don’t want to get in the way,’ Pierce said. ‘We only want to have a look.’

‘We’re journalists,’ I added quickly, seeing that the policeman was getting sterner and icier.

Either he didn’t believe me, or he held journalists in low regard. Quite possibly both. Again, he pointed through us, back up the road. ‘Media,’ he said. ‘Ocado car park.’

‘Excuse me?’ Pierce said.

The police officer indulged in a couple of slow, disdainful blinks. ‘Media liaison,’ he said, crafting every syllable, ‘Ocado car park.’ The pointing finger jabbed, once. ‘That way, gentlemen.’

‘You’ve been so terrific,’ Pierce said, taking out his phone. ‘Can I get a picture together?’

The officer had not lowered his arm. ‘That way.’

A flimsy laminated sign was zip-tied to the gate of the Ocado distribution portal. Distracted by the toy-bright vans parked in neat ranks, I had missed it on our way past. It read:

METROPOLITAN POLICE

MAJOR INCIDENT

MEDIA LIAISON

With an arrow.

‘Ocado,’ I said, still hopeful of eliciting some psychogeographical gems from Pierce. ‘The jihadists just need to knock out this facility and middle-class London starves.’ Bella and Dan used Ocado. On two occasions, they had been out at the time of delivery and had called me to take in their shopping. You wouldn’t believe the fuss Bella made over a melted sorbet.

‘Don’t knock Ocado,’ Pierce said. ‘When I couldn’t leave the house, they were lifesavers. Their drivers were about the only people I spoke to for three weeks. I should drop in and say hello.’

I didn’t say anything in reply. The roadblock had evaporated what was left of my momentum, and I was hunting for the earliest possible opportunity to call a halt and make for the pub. Not the nearest pub – I wanted somewhere I could be comfortable, where I could get myself home quickly under autopilot, not an alien boozer on the wrong side of Barking. I began to feel very far from the centre, very far from the convenience store and the fridge. But Pierce blazed on ahead.