Simon was freezing, having left his coat in the car, and getting hungrier by the second. He groaned when Seed got up to buy more food. Two doughnuts and a coffee. Greedy bastard. Seed sat down again. He seemed in no hurry at all.

Finally, at twenty-five past six, he stood and stretched. He left the food court without picking up his newspaper and made for the station exit. Simon followed him out on to the Euston Road, to a crossing. He hung back, but there was no need. There were so many people pushing along the pavement in both directions that Seed would have had a job spotting him even if he’d been looking.

Simon crossed the road and kept his eye on the shiny black shoulder patches ahead. A woman coming in the opposite direction banged his arm with hers. Simon mumbled, ‘Sorry,’ but the woman said nothing, though their collision had been her fault. He couldn’t believe how rude some people were. Aware that his mind had drifted, he pushed the thought away.

The black jacket was gone. How could Seed have disappeared so quickly? The pavement was busy but not that busy. It wasn’t possible that Simon had lost him in the split second he’d spent thinking about that sodding woman.

Two people walking ahead, a man and a woman, turned right and went round the side of a wide building with large windows symmetrically spaced across its faμade. Simon looked because it was the only other option. If Seed wasn’t ahead, behind or across the road . . .

There he was, going in through a side door at the top of a concrete ramp. He stopped when he saw the man and woman approach, said hello to them, but it wasn’t the sort of greeting that would pass between friends, Simon thought. They knew each other, but not well.

Once they’d gone inside, Simon approached the door and saw that it had been wedged open. He peered into a wide, empty foyer containing a reception desk with a cash till at one end. Beyond the foyer was a corridor leading to another door. Closed. There was a poster on it that Simon couldn’t read, and a table to the left, covered with leaflets, books and pastel-coloured pamphlets.

Three elderly men with long, straggly hair and matted beards passed him on their way in, leaving in their wake a smell of stale sweat infused with alcohol. Homeless, Simon guessed. Once they’d gone into the room, he moved. The poster on the door at the far end of the corridor was headed ‘Quaker Quest’. Immediately, Simon thought of his two miserable experiences of Laser Quest in the early 1990s—birthday parties he’d been unable to avoid, friends from university who strove to be wacky. He pictured the three ageing tramps he’d just seen running around a darkened room, brandishing glowing swords.