And now they were walking through Holborn, cutting down a back street, heading for a bus stop. And that feeling, the feeling of being with friends, wouldn’t go away: it had been months, years, since he’d felt this companionship. Sure, there were clients. Mornings drinking weak tea with old men and women; hearing stories he’d heard before. Tales of courage as faded as the throws on their sofas. He didn’t doubt their heroism, these wizened heroes; he just wondered what stories he’d have to tell when his time came, and whether there’d be anyone listening. Benny was saying something funny, and John hadn’t caught it but laughed anyway, like friends do, and the large man who loomed out of nowhere didn’t touch him hard, just rammed a forearm across his throat and the world went watery. He dropped to his knees so suddenly, something gave. And Daisy screamed, but not for long, and then she too was on the ground, everything about her out of focus. None of that took long. Benny, though; Benny was really being given the business. He was making the noises a punchbag makes. There must have been two of them, because someone was holding Benny up; he’d have been a puddle on the pavement otherwise. John stopped paying attention and threw up again. Then practised breathing. The men stopped hitting Benny and went away. More people came running towards them, shouting nothing coherent. And somewhere on the far side of London a siren was already wailing their way; would grow louder and louder until John couldn’t hear it at all but was wrapped up inside it instead, a little lump of silence at the heart of a beating city.

He remained in bed for two days. Then his phone rang and wouldn’t stop, and he had to crawl out to find it. Whatever they’d done to him at Casualty had stopped the pain for a while but not forever. It felt like his knee was bursting.

“You bastard. Thought that was clever, didn’t you?”

“. . . Benny?”

His voice was a scratchy old recording; one of those Victorian wax pressings that captured starched collars and indignation, but failed to convey much meaning.

“You bastard.”

John managed to haul himself onto a chair. Here, once, Solly had sat, looking at the houses opposite and imagining the lives they held, all the different possibilities crammed into a terrace. His own possibilities had ended in the room John had just emerged from.

“They took my memory.”

That’s what he thought Benny said, and for a moment he revelled in the idea of the same thing happening to him. Total erasure. He could start again with a blank slate, make less of a mess of things this time.

Stick, though. Benny meant memory stick.

His one and only copy.

John said, “I didn’t know . . .”

But he had really. Had known Lady Di Taverner would cause bad things to happen. You couldn’t walk around with the kind of knowledge Benny had been carrying and not expect ramifications.