For the first time in our acquaintance I felt that something I had said to Pierce had really affected him. The indignation and pride that he had displayed moments earlier were gone, and he had the same haunted look he had at times when we first met, when he must have been weighing up the confession he was about to make. The squareness and bulk of him was unchanged, but now appeared baggy and tired, not a reservoir of force. I knew what it was: he wanted to salvage something, to retain some of his reputation as a writer, some of Night Traffic’s renown as literature. And he was seeing that it might not be possible.

‘If you want to go ahead and come clean,’ I said, ‘you’re going to have to get used to this kind of reaction. Worse. People won’t want a sympathetic interview. They will want me to beat you up on the page, and if I hold back, they’ll do it themselves. The days of good faith are over, my friend. Everything you did, it won’t just be considered a sin, it’ll be considered an insult, and that’s so much worse.’

My innards lurched. Not nausea, though that was coming – an instinct I had gone too far. However long and wrong this day had been, I still had to get a feature article out of Pierce. The truly great interview I had seen shining before me was still attainable, unless I drove Pierce away. He might simply decide to clam up; worse, he might decide that there was no value in having this pet magazine journalist if he wouldn’t even follow instructions, and go to one of our rivals, or a newspaper.

‘You do want to go ahead?’ I asked gently. We had reached the overgrown base of the stairs up to the footbridge. As we ascended, Pierce kept his head bowed, thoughtful rather than humble.

‘I do, I do,’ he said. ‘I have to. Quin, remember? And I have to get on with my life. There has to be a way to do it that minimises the backlash.’

This struck me as delusional, but I admired his commitment to the idea. Maybe it was just denial, or a natural but misplaced desire to weasel out of the full consequences of his fraud. However I thought there might be a little more to it than that: an urge towards literary experimentation. Pierce wanted to take an established prose form, the confessional interview, and screw with its boundaries and conventions. And, truly, I wanted to enable that in any way possible, even if it meant being a passive enabler of what he had in mind. What I did not want was for him to take fright and decide to do it the normal way with the Sunday Times.