‘Patricia Highsmith,’ she repeated. ‘I enjoy a good Patricia Highsmith. In case your friend thought I didn’t read anything.’ She nodded towards Pierce.

‘Patricia Highsmith,’ Pierce said. ‘Me too.’

Colourful hieroglyphs on the pavement, spray-painted by contractors, arrows and boxes limning the subterrain: Blocked. No signal. By now I should have been deep in the bosom of Alexander De Chauncey. I didn’t want to look at my phone, to measure the fallout of my cancellation, but my conscience was able to briefly overpower my other inhibitions and I looked. There was an email from his PR. Three minutes after I sent mine. ‘Very inconvenient … Time very limited … Difficult to reschedule at this notice …’

Bad. Not maximum bad, and no worse than I could reasonably expect, but bad. Would they go straight to Eddie and complain? That might be the end for me. But there were no emails from Eddie or Polly, nothing else out of the ordinary. Would they email about something like that? Unlikely. It would be a phone call.

My phone sprang to life in my hand, throbbing with an incoming call, and almost flew out of my hand as I spasmed in surprise. Adrenalin thumped through my system. The passing chemical blitz made me woozy, and I felt the blackout grey crawling in at the corners of my vision.

Withheld number. That could mean one of the phones at the office.

I swiped to answer, thumb skidding on the drops of drizzle that had clung to the phone screen, little pinpricks of rainbow.

‘Jack Blick?’ said an unfamiliar voice, a confident drawl.

‘Bick,’ I said. ‘Yes. Hello.’

‘Alexander De Chauncey.’ He savoured every syllable of his name.

‘Mr Chauncey, Mr De Chauncey,’ I began, already stumbling. I was completely on the wrong side of this conversation, the one who needed a boon from the other, and the one who had just done wrong by the other, a double supplicant, and De Chauncey didn’t sound as if he was on the wrong side of anything, ever. ‘I’m so sorry about this afternoon, I had another interview and it has—’

‘Where are you?’ De Chauncey asked, drawing out the words again, a note of bemusement in the question, as if there was nowhere that I could reasonably be.

‘Er, Barking, as it happens,’ I said. He could probably tell that I was outside, and hear the wind against the phone mic. ‘I left a message with—’

A soft cluck or tut came over the line – perhaps no more than the sound of a man turning a Polo mint over in his mouth. ‘We were supposed to be meeting,’ he said. ‘The girl from the magazine said you were coming over this afternoon.’

His girling of Polly, my immediate manager and a terrifying force in my life, triggered conflicting emotions: a crackle of righteous anger on her behalf, a spark of amusement and delight. ‘As I said in my email—’ I began.