‘You have to understand why people will be angry,’ I said. ‘It’ll be seen as romanticisation of crime. Genuine victims of crime will be angry, especially if they read the book.’

‘You’re a genuine victim of crime,’ Pierce said with a drop of acid. ‘What makes you angry about it?’

‘Well, you lied your way into my trust, which is a betrayal,’ I said. ‘Reading something like that is a two-way process: you, the author, are opening up to the reader, but in turn the reader feels as if they’re sharing something with you. Regardless of how adeptly you did it, you were taking a creative holiday in my misery. That’s as bad as fraud, really, because there’s this implication that you wanted to experience an attack; rather than merely finding the good in a terrible experience, you were making that case from nothing. And you really don’t want to experience an attack. The second time I was mugged, it … well, it really fucked up my life.’

We had reached the top of the stairs, disturbing a skulking pigeon. It fled up and out in an explosion of wings and scrambling claws. But before I clocked that it was a pigeon, I saw the pale burst of escaping feathers and a shining avian eye and imagined a rarer bird had been waiting for me.

‘Can you tell me about it?’ Pierce said. ‘That second time?’

No, I realised – it wouldn’t make sense and he wouldn’t understand. It was too open to interpretation, and might not obviously support what I had been saying. ‘I don’t think I can,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry. Not now, or here.’

The encroaching gloom had made the footbridge a tunnel through Hades. Its few lights revealed enough of its slick, foul surfaces to make the threat clear. Another stunted winter day giving up. Coming through here alone, at night, was as unimaginably unwise to me as trekking solo through a crocodile swamp.

‘We know getting mugged is horrible, Pierce,’ I said. ‘You don’t have to go through it to know that. The fear of it spills out, infects the city. Places like this. It shuts down parts of the urban circuits, corrupts the operating system.’

‘I think you’d be pretty safe here,’ Pierce said. ‘No one in their right mind would have a good reason to come here at night. Not even muggers. I hear what you’re saying. But fear isn’t a good measure of a situation. We fear lots of things that turn out fine. And there are lots of other things that we should fear, but don’t.’