This to me is a natural part of the enjoyment of reading. Reading is a stimulating experience, suggesting ideas and situations and stories. We read partly for that pleasure. The instinct to remember stories and re-tell them is innate. We learn to love stories as children. When we’ve heard a good story there’s a real pleasure in narrating the sequence of events again, especially if it contains a surprise, or ends in an unexpected way, or is funny or shocking. From this instinct, many a successful novelist has emerged.

The creation of a story, though, is not simply a matter of re-telling a sequence of events, however embellished those events might become in the process. Writers do come across unusual or interesting stories in newspapers and magazines, they watch television and take ideas from odd moments in news bulletins, they do listen to what they happen to hear strangers talking about. Some even carry notebooks and jot down snatches of random overheard conversations. But all this is the minor raw material for stories.

Other more complex and undefinable sources exist. Personal experience of things that went wrong, or for that matter went well, or living their own lives as they grew up, taking risks, suffering blows, achieving and surviving. Or there is a need felt by the writer to make a certain point or argument, and then will construct a story to illustrate it. Or one of the great classical works, drama, a major novel from the previous century, will suggest a theme that is still relevant in the present day and can be reworked imaginatively.

There is no rule about this. Where writers find inspiration and develop their ideas is not a practical or literal exercise – nobody can truly describe it because to a large extent it is an internal, organic process.

In all innocence, and with the best intentions in the world, readers will often say to a writer something similar to what Frejah was saying to me: ‘I know a great story. If I tell you what it is, you can write it into your next book.’

Because I did not wish to seem rude or arrogant, but partly because I could not forget she was a cop and I was nervous of the underlying differences that were emerging between us, and also because I was going to be in her company for at least another day, I could not, would not, say any of the above to her.

But I really did not wish to listen to several hours of her case histories.

I said, weakly: ‘Maybe we should be getting back on the road?’

‘There’s no hurry,’ Frejah said. ‘We’ve made good time. I think you’ll be interested in some of my experiences. One of the first cases I ever dealt with—’

‘Frejah,’ I said. ‘You should never tell story ideas to a writer, a novelist. We steal everything we write about.’