Piotr scrunched his eyes shut and leaned back on his sofa, only to open them wide again and stare at the ceiling. Which needed painting. Which had a spider’s web not exactly in the corner – in the corner would have been more OK – but it was forming around the old light fitting and had developed into a long, thick, hanging thread. It reminded him of the fake cobwebs you get at Halloween. But it wasn’t fake, and it was in his goddamn living room. He reached for Sweet Potato and lifted her onto his lap. Her body was warm on his legs, her fur soft and fluffy. She was a large cat, and patient – she allowed him ten seconds before leaving his lap and curling herself onto her cushion.

He’d be laughed at if he took his suspicions into the office, that much he was sure of. A coincidence, they’d say. A bit of graffiti on a poster – it would be cleaned up by tomorrow, they’d say, and of course they would be right. But then there was that advert in the paper on the Tube. He hardly ever read the paper, no one did, it was just something to glance through, to look at some pictures or catch the name of a new restaurant … He’d almost flicked right past. It looked so like the adverts they placed for the pouch, for the whole FullLife range of plans, that the words sunk in subliminally. But then he’d realised. They were advertising a new plan: a natural-birth plan. They’d never done that before.

He shook his head, tried to get her out of his mind.

There was something going on. Call it instinct. Call it a hunch. But there was something. And he had to think of someone he could talk to – someone else. He needed to bounce his ideas off other people. That was how he worked. At least it was how he had worked, back when he had done anything worthwhile. It must be some kind of punishment, that he ended up on every assignment alone. Or maybe it was just that no one could predict what his articles would end up saying. He didn’t write to a brief, no matter how many times they gave him one.