My backpack’s lying beside my feet, where it was when I slid down the pylon all those hours or minutes or seconds ago. I reach inside it and find my phone to look at the time. 5.27, it tells me. Minutes, then.

But hours since I ran.

42

Danny

If it had been left up to me and possibly any other cab driver in London, there’s a good chance we would have ended up just driving around in random circles until my debit card had been milked dry. But it turned out I’d hit the jackpot for the second time in as many months when I flagged down Jaz.

As it happened, we did drive around in circles, but they were far from random because once we were back on the outskirts of Camden, Jaz pulled over to put a little meat on the bones of the plan. ‘OK, look, if you’re going to be slinging me all this cash, I wouldn’t feel right unless we’re working to some kind of system. Otherwise, we’re just floating around like a couple of snowflakes in a hurricane, aren’t we?’

I didn’t say, but that actually sounded fairly close to the situation inside my head at that stage. I was definitely not sober, but in a close enough neighbourhood to know that my dry mouth and woolly brain were probably going to get worse before they got better.

Jaz took a notepad and pen out of her console and sketched a rough map of North-West London, although, as she proudly informed me, this was mostly for my benefit because her enlarged hippocampus (a well-proven by-product of the London Knowledge, apparently) meant she’d already mentally plotted out a proposed route. Her plan was to drive in a rough spiral, working our way from the outside in and ending up back in Belsize Park, with luck finding Wolfie somewhere along the way.

Jaz passed the map back through the glass partition.

‘What do you think?’

It was certainly better than my standard scattergun approach to things and, actually, Jaz seemed to have a knack of making things sound easy – even something as far-fetched as this. Although my criminally underused voice of reason was pointing out none too quietly that the chances of finding Wolfie were slim – the very longest of long shots, in fact – the nagging worry that had formed in my gut after seeing that stuff on the ceiling was tipping the balance. Because if Wolfie wasn’t conveniently stomping around the streets waiting to be found, the potential range of alternatives was not something I really wanted to think about. Jaz and her spiral were all I had and, however flimsy a plan, it was definitely better than sitting in the Lamb and Flag being everyone’s biggest disappointment. I passed the map back and rapped my debit card on the glass way more confidently than I felt.

‘Love your work, Jaz. Spiral it is. Rack ’em up, babe!’

As we pulled back out into traffic, Jaz propped her scribbled but very logical map on the dash and something struck me. From a distance that spiral looked a bit like circles, getting smaller and smaller towards the middle, and surely my father’s sage advice would work in reverse, too? Ever-decreasing circles? The thought definitely made me feel a lot more cheerful.