‘Um, so—’

‘How the hell did I find you and what the hell am I doing here?’ I nearly got whiplash from the speed of her retort.

‘Well, OK, yeah. I guess that is sort of what I was going to ask.’ I felt like I was on the back foot again, and not just because I was drunk.

Wolfie’s eyes didn’t leave my face as she reached behind the fruit bowl and slid a folded-over newspaper across the table. Her nails were painted with dark navy polish, which was smudged over the edges on to her fingers, and she was pointing at a photo.

‘Page three, this week’s Double. Dom said you guys didn’t even know it was in there.’ To be fair, apart from the Guardian, not many newspapers get a look in around here, so that part was no surprise. I leaned forward for a better view of the photo and saw that someone had given the guy some heavy treatment with a purple felt tip. I was still trying to work out what it had to do with me, when George got back in the game and saved me the trouble.

‘It’s YOU, you big doughnut! You’s in the newspaper!’ Before I had time to digest what he was saying, he snatched up the paper and started waving it around in my face and dancing on the spot. ‘You’re famous, Danny, look! Famous for being ruuuuude! Look at your spaghetti arms!’

‘George, pipe down!’ Dom made a successful grab for the paper and placed it back down in front of me, smoothing his hand across the photo. I closed one eye and leaned in, banging my forehead on the pint glass of water on the way. My brain gently reverberated. Was George serious? Was that me? I squinted and the caption underneath the defaced photo came into focus.

Danny Mulberry, 42, of Glenmore Road, Belsize Park, makes his feelings clear as he is arrested for graffitiing the pavement outside what turned out to be his own home.

As in shamefully slow motion it sank in that, underneath all the purple felt tip, that wild-haired and – fair play – spaghetti-armed guy was in fact me (although excuse me very much, forty-two?), I realised Wolfie was talking.

‘. . . and then, like I said to Dom, something twigged, because that name’s not exactly Smith, is it? Mulberry, I mean. And when I compared this to my mother’s old photos, let’s face it, you haven’t really changed that much, have you? Well . . .’ She looked at me sideways. ‘You’re much older, obviously, but I figured two and two usually equals four. Or forty-two in your case.’ That’s it, I was definitely going to be suing for defamation at my earliest possible convenience.

Despite the water, I still wasn’t firing on all cylinders, so I’d missed a lot of what Wolfie had said. But I was fairly confident I had the basics. Courtesy of Ray’s lightning reflexes and very un-neighbourly attitude, a photo of me had somehow ended up in the paper. Then this girl, who happened to be the niece I’d had no idea existed, had stumbled across it out of the blue. The odds of that must have been longer than the chance of getting quadruple pineapples on the fruit machine at the Lamb and Flag. But then again, look how that turned out.