On the platform, huddled out of the steady, heavy almost-rain, we talked briefly and ambiguously about what would come next. I said I’d be in touch the next day. Pierce said he’d think about it. The pub excursion we had originally sketched out was forgotten. The pub is useless for determined drinking. I needed quiet, and privacy. The fridge had to be restocked. I needed to be away from people, all people, but especially Pierce. I needed the kind of clean that alcohol gave me, the dreamless sleep. Peace, alone on the sofa, a kebab or a box of chicken, that first beer, that nth beer. I could taste it – worse, I could not taste it, not yet.

Was there material to write a feature? Of some kind, sure. If 2,000 words could be woven out of fifteen PR-supervised minutes with a distracted celebrity in a hotel room, there’d be no trouble getting it from this sprawling wreck of a day. We had talked for hours. But at the same time I felt that he had told me very little. Most obviously, he had not even hinted at why he had faked the book. This waffle about ‘authentic urban experiences’ was not entirely convincing, not least because it contradicted itself. It had the smell of a smokescreen thrown up to obscure something else. Perhaps this was genuine journalistic instinct on my part. It hardly mattered because as I was thinking this, he stood beside me – jacket collar pulled up against the cold, hands crammed into pockets – and I didn’t ask him. Getting away was more important. The minutes creaked by. No device is slower than the orange-lit information display in an unimportant station. Out at the edge, among the hubs.

For the rest of the journey we spoke very little, and it wasn’t a long journey. Pierce got off the train at Barking in order to get the Tube back to Bow Road. I stayed on, aiming at Fenchurch Street. The train moved with little urgency, as if it could feel the rush-hour pressure building up in the city at the end of its line, and feared that approaching too fast could cause the whole place to rupture.