That was Brody’s cue. By the time she’d flipped the sign over so ‘OPEN’ faced the street outside, he was in the back yard, a confused-looking and biscuit-deprived Lewis trailing dejectedly beside him.

But Brody didn’t hurry back to his car. He couldn’t. His lungs had given up completely now.

The yard around him became distant and rather fuzzy, as if he was viewing it through a dirty telescope from far away, and the sounds that had been so invasive when he’d first got out of his car were drowned out by the rushing noise in his ears.

Oh, God. This was it. The moment he was going to die. He reached out to the brick wall for support and dropped into a crouching position, head bent towards his knees.

Moji was only a short distance away inside the shop. He could hear her chatting to the woman about her daughter-inlaw’s water birth and might have been able to call out to her, but the thought of opening his mouth and firing words from it only made his head spin faster and his heart pound harder.

He had to get up. He had to get to his car. He had to…

Something warm and rough touched him and he flinched before looking down to find Lewis sitting neatly beside him, quietly licking his hand.

It pulled him back into the moment. Something shifted inside him. The rushing in his ears remained, along with a vague sense of being off-balance – like one might experience on a cross-Channel ferry – as he tried to place one foot in front of the other, but he could move again. That was something.

It seemed to take hours instead of minutes to get back to the car park. A woman with a pushchair scowled at him from the other side of the road, obviously thinking it was a little early for him to have staggered out of the pub.

When he got to his Land Rover, he climbed inside. The lack of central locking meant he had to reach over to press the buttons down on the passenger side and both the back doors one by one. That done, he sat with his elbows on the steering wheel, rested his head in hands and tried to get the world to stop shaking.

Chapter Sixteen

ANNA SAT AT one end of a long table in the upstairs room of a funky bar in Covent Garden. It was decked out like a nineteenth-century gentlemen’s club, complete with wood panelling, richly upholstered chaise-longues and a stuffed stag’s head above the fireplace. On the table in front of her was a large balloon glass full of wonderfully aromatic alcohol, finished off with a giant ball of ice and a sprig of rosemary. She was joined by eight other people, each with an identical glass, and the tenth seat, beside her, was empty.

As she listened to a smartly dressed man with a waxed moustache detail the history of gin, she surreptitiously checked her phone.