The software was obviously more than a mere database and I was unsure what it was intended to do. The sense of being selected as an individual target, in person, made me distinctly nervous. I was quite possibly the only writer of commercial detective thrillers on Salay Raba, the fourth. I had never heard of another, but I supposed it was possible there would be others. This would be one way of finding out?

But the last thing I wanted was to be personally identified.

I hit the Return to Main Menu option.

The fact was that I was uninterested in all the other options.

If you have spent most of your adult life reading and writing books, and using social media about books, and following book bloggers, and reading literary magazines, and finding emails from people who are interested in the same books as yourself, and if you write the occasional review of other writers’ books, and if you have a circle of friends and colleagues also deeply involved with books in particular, and the arts in general, you end up with a fairly restricted but focused set of interests. It is not a position of superiority over others, but it does give you the point of view of the specialist.

Writers become interested in a hundred other unrelated subjects, but in an incidental, distant, practical way. They find out about things so they can put them in the next book, or at least hint that such knowledge is in the background of that book. Literature remains the centre of gravity.

Some non-writers might consider this to be an élitist attitude, but I think otherwise. It is the life I have always known and have become used to. I have been writing books for nearly twenty years, and for sixteen of those years I have lived contentedly with and worked alongside Jo Delson, herself a specialist of a similar kind.

I could not care less about Building and Design, Social Services, Retail Trade. Least of all about Financial Services, which as far as I was concerned might exist on another planet in another universe, and the people who prospered from it were alien to everything I knew or loved.

I was still mildly irritated by the software, by my running it, by what it seemed to imply.

I clicked on Financial Services.

The monitor showed the pale blue screen again, and the message: Installing Financial Services Protocols for Salay Group: Raba, the fourth. A new green bar began its slow transit across the bottom of the screen.

When it reached 5 per cent I left the study and went to the kitchen to prepare my evening meal. It was showing 32 per cent by the time I had finished eating. I watched the TV news, then a double episode of a crime series: 81 per cent. I used my cellphone to contact Jo, and we had a long conversation: 97 per cent.