I’m at the wheel this time and we move off into the night. I don’t know if it’s because Amsterdam’s special, or that I’ve lived here so long that I’m just somehow tuned in to it, but there’s a definite change in the vibration of the city as it shifts gear, from the grind of the working day towards the promise of evening play. You can feel it in the air, a crackle of energy that feeds your imagination. Though I get the sense that Vermeer’s not tuned in to it. She’s pensive, an echo of her earlier outburst hanging around her like a shroud.

Turning on to Eerste van der Helststraat a street light’s flickering, like we’re celebretards and it’s a paparazzo. She breathes out and suddenly clocks our general direction, surfacing from whatever deep place she was in.

‘What, we’re going to stake the place out?’

‘Such a bad idea?’

‘Maybe not.’

But I turn onto Gerard Doustraat, past the tattoo parlour I’d once had to arrest someone in. They were eventually convicted of murder, but at the moment I’d burst in he was having a swastika inked onto his left arm. Only I didn’t let him finish, so now he’s in prison with a nonsensical tat and probably about fifteen years before he can do anything about it.

At the far end of the street there’s a little bar Tanya and I used to go to when we first started seeing each other, those deliciously expansive days when we were falling in love. Days I try not to revisit too often.

The bar itself is a rabbit warren of a drinking hole, started by an old American lesbian who decided there weren’t enough bars in Amsterdam that celebrated 1920s swimsuit porn, and so decorated the place with blown-up scratchy black and white images of women in less-than-revealing one-piece swimsuits. Luckily for her a young crowd had decided the whole thing was unbelievably cool, and the place had rapidly acquired a steady stream of clientele. Then the inevitable, some hack working for a travel guide stumbled across it and within a year the place was filled with tourists congratulating themselves on being just so goddamned hip. The old lesbian died, and the place has been preserved like a museum piece; it’s all there, but something’s missing.