‘I understand,’ he says. ‘George says that you saw someone. Outside.’

‘Yeah. He looked well dodgy, and the way things are right now, I’m not taking any chances.’

‘So you ran.’

‘I would have come back.’ I can see he’s got that bullshit detector turned up nice and high. ‘OK, so I probably wouldn’t. Not straight away.’

‘Where would you have gone?’

‘I wasn’t thinking that far ahead.’

If I’d had the chance to walk out of that café in my own sweet time, I honestly don’t know where I would have headed. I’d probably have called Banksy in the end, maybe asked if I could crash at his place. Thinking about it, though, he might well have made the phone call I’d suspected the woman in the café had made, and I probably wouldn’t have held that against him.

‘It was nice,’ I say. ‘Just being away for a bit.’

‘Alice, listen to me.’ Marcus puts down his clipboard, the notes for a report he’ll have to write on the ‘incident’. ‘If you continue to take your medication and make an effort to stay calm, so that we can help you . . . you can be away for a lot longer than a bit. You can go home.’

‘Not sure that’s going to happen now,’ I say.

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t know . . . things are coming to a head. I’m not saying that’s what I want, but I don’t think I’ve got a lot of say in it.’ I was thinking about this all the way back from the café and I’m almost certain of it now. The scary stuff’s getting really close and I can’t stop it because, actually, I’m not sure I’m supposed to. ‘After Kevin was killed and I started running round trying to find out who’d done it . . .’ I see his expression darken. He doesn’t want to listen to me bad-mouthing his ‘friend and colleague’ again. So I don’t. ‘It’s as if I started something, you know? Set a ball rolling. I’m not going anywhere until it hits and even though I’m not thrilled about what’s coming, it feels like I need it to happen.’

I take a few seconds then look at him. ‘Does that make sense?’

He picks up his clipboard again.

So, clearly not.