Of course, O will have been tracking me all this time.

‘You know it wasn’t me, right?’ I sound breathless partly because he’s knocked the wind out of me, and partly because he’s just grabbed my backside and lifted me off my feet so as to press me into his giant erection.

‘I know it wasn’t you,’ he whispers into my hair. ‘I’m sorry I got you into this mess.’

‘Antonio. Put me down.’ He puts me down but doesn’t let go. He’s quite tall, and the head of his penis nudges my rib cage.

I clear my throat and disengage, a little weak at the knees.

‘Sorry,’ Antonio says. ‘I just—’

‘Yeah.’

He takes a pocket pack of tissues out of his jacket and blows his nose. He folds the tissue neatly but his hands are trembling.

Roman says, ‘Please take a seat, Antonio. So glad you came. We’d like to talk to each of you one at a time.’

‘One at a time! One at a time!’ Antonio points at each of them with a kind of random violence. ‘That is what they do when they want us to turn on each other, Charlie! Don’t say anything else. I’m calling you a lawyer.’

‘Actually,’ I say, ‘I think I am going home now.’

Donato glares at me. ‘We’ve barely got started.’

I try to glare back. Confrontations terrify me. I can’t look Donato in the eye without thinking how he’s going to grab me by the throat and then they’ll throw me in the back of their blacked-out 4X4 and take me somewhere secret, like an abandoned mental institution, and torture and kill me, and I’ll end up on the bottom of the Thames. Eel food.

‘Donato, you’re scaring her,’ Roman says. He seems a decent enough sort, but Donato doesn’t take him seriously at all. I wonder if it’s because he’s not in the best nick. Donato obviously works out a lot. The backs of his shirts are all stretched in the shoulders, whereas Roman’s are stretched in the belly. Donato swings his arms, kicks a chair and walks over to the counter. He leans on it as if he’s a morally tortured character in a Dostoevsky novel. I can almost see the thought bubble over his head: Why do I have to put up with these idiots?

I pick up my bag and put on my hoodie.