‘Anyway, I’d love just a few minutes of your time to talk about your escape from the attic and the Twitter thread and’ – Tim put on a flourish here – ‘your new viral fame!’

Everyone stared at Jack, who was trying very hard to appear at ease.

‘Jack,’ Alexa said, commandingly. ‘Now that we are free, will you please tell us what precisely is going on? What did your Twitter thread say? Why did it go viral? And why is there a man from the BBC in our kitchen?’ She crossed her arms.

Alexa had said it better than she could, but Ellen felt impelled to add something for good measure. ‘Yeah, spill,’ she said, threateningly.

Jack now looked like a man cornered. His shoulders were slumped, his head bowed, and his clothes looked baggier than they had in the attic. He put his hand on the back of his neck and peered up at them all through his eyelashes.

‘We’re waiting,’ Alexa added, coldly.

Realizing he couldn’t put this off any longer, he took a very deep breath. ‘Well, as you know, I helped to get us out,’ he said, quietly. ‘It was my Twitter thread that found its way to these guys.’

‘Yes, I think we’d all sort of got there already,’ Ellen said, drily. ‘Perhaps you could enlighten us as to what precisely the Twitter thread said that seems to have got the press interested.’

‘And stop stalling,’ Alexa directed.

Jack opened his mouth and closed it and – in a moment of rashness – Ellen made to sprint towards him to grab the phone from his hand. Except they were both wading through water, so instead of sprinting, she started floundering. He was about two metres away. Time seemed to stand still as she stepped, comically slowly, towards him. He moved backwards in slow motion, his trousers distended and flapping.

Ellen reached him, and held out her hand.

After a pause, he surrendered the phone.

‘What’s your code?’

‘123456,’ Jack said, quietly.

‘Are you joking?’ She tapped it in. He was not joking.

‘That’s not a very secure code,’ Ben pointed out.

‘Maybe we should stop worrying about Jack’s code and see what the Twitter thread is all about?’ Alexa sounded tetchy.

Ellen found the Twitter icon. He had a hundred plus notifications – the little bubble had given up telling him precisely how many. She tapped it and opened his account. She went straight to his page and read the tweets.

It was as she had suspected. Jack had been detailing the humiliations of the last few hours: her and Ben’s MSN relationship and the arguments, and even the weeing in the box. The tweets had been liked and retweeted by tens of thousands of people now. Thank God he hadn’t used her name.

‘El, what do the tweets say?’ Alexa asked. She sounded terrified.