He had come into work this morning with the need to talk to someone, to pour it all out, to get it off his chest. He didn’t expect catharsis, just some relief. Last night, at 3 a.m., Lucy and Chris had played extracts from War of the Worlds – the seventies ‘rock opera’ – not at full volume, but just loud enough for Jamie to hear it and for it to come seeping into his dreams. He had woken up and jumped out of bed in a state of shocked disbelief and stared at the floorboards. When he was eight or nine, his parents used to play this album late at night after he’d gone to bed. And as a little boy with a large imagination, he had lain awake, convinced that the Martians were coming for him. The album came with a booklet of paintings, in which men and women ran screaming through the Victorian streets, pursued by a Martian death machine; red alien liquid bubbled between once-glorious buildings; a priest held up a cross before an unimpressed Martian who fired off a death ray to obliterate him. All these images of horror and destruction floated before his eyes, along with a few original ones, conjured up by his pre-adolescent mind. In the end, after a week of nightmares, he reluctantly told his mum why he had been so tired and unhappy recently and, filled with remorse, she had binned the album, making him promise that he would tell her if anything scared him in the future. He shouldn’t be ashamed, even if he was a big boy now.

Maybe I should phone her now, he thought. Tell her I’m afraid. Afraid because I don’t know what I’m going to do about it.

How on earth had Lucy and Chris known? They had managed to pinpoint how the Newtons knew about Kirsty’s arachnophobia – they’d mentioned it at the dinner party – but how did they know about Jamie’s old fear? He racked his brains. Had he mentioned his fear of that music to them? No; no he hadn’t. He’d never mentioned it to anyone. Not even Kirsty. In fact, he had practically forgotten that album existed. In the early nineties, someone had released a dance mix of the War of the Worlds music, and he found that it didn’t scare him any more – not in the sweaty centre of a heaving, lively nightclub, anyway. But at three a.m., in the dark, the music coming up from beneath the floorboards brought back all those childhood terrors. He could almost see the alien tripods outside the window. He thought harder, tried to work it out – but there was no way they could have known about his fear. No way.