And unless he could think of a way of getting round that, he had no choice but to find Benny Manors.

So he hit the pubs round King’s Cross. What else was he going to do? He asked about his old friend Benny, had Benny been in?, and received blank looks. One place he was convinced had been the pub where it started: this was where he’d been sitting when Benny punched him in the face. There was the door to the gents it had been a struggle to navigate. But he had the same sensation an hour or so later somewhere else, and besides, what difference did it make? Nobody had heard of Benny here, there, or any of the places in between. They weren’t establishments where one punch thrown several years back was still talked about. There’d been punches since. They blurred together.

And another problem was, going into a pub and asking questions, it was de rigueur to buy a drink.

Drunks and pigeons: there are homing instincts. In fact—one of the random thoughts that flitted through John Bachelor’s brain at two in the morning, when it occurred to him that he was back at Solly’s, with no recollection of getting there—in fact, it would be interesting to get a pigeon drunk, to see whether this improved its homeward flight time. But that thought only lasted as long as it took him to crawl into bed, where the ceiling rotated like a fan in a black-and-white movie. He hadn’t found Benny Manors; hadn’t even found anyone pretending they knew Benny Manors. If Benny Manors had suggested King’s Cross as a convenient meeting place, it was only because Benny Manors hadn’t wanted John to know where a really convenient meeting place might be, such as wherever it was Benny Manors actually hung out. And as things stood, the only pointer he had to Benny’s whereabouts was that, on their one and only encounter to date, the man had been drinking Newcastle Brown Ale. That notion circled John’s head in the opposite direction to the ceiling, making him nauseous. He was too old for this. And even when he’d been young enough for this, it had lacked what you might call glamour. He slept at last, or managed a kind of sleep, which felt more like a ride on a broken Ferris wheel. When he regained consciousness, he felt abandoned rather than rested. And the usual morning stocktake yielded no happy balance: he’d spent nigh on a week’s salary greasing conversational wheels, and his mouth felt like a ferret’s timeshare.

He stumbled to the shower. It was still early, way too early, but the glimmer of an idea had broken on him while he was riding that wheel, and although its only real attraction lay in the absence of any alternative, there was a slight possibility that its light might guide him home. He was probably still drunk, after all. And it would be foolish not to take advantage of the fact.