After that I just waited for a while: in the back garden until the sun got too high, then in the basement with the ravens. Morning shaded into afternoon, with no sign of Pen. She couldn’t know that I’d wake up and feed the birds, so her absence was doubly hard to explain.

I was on the rack again by this time: sweating like a warthog, with a sick, hollow feeling in my stomach that only alcohol could fill. My head throbbed as though it was a blood-filled pimple that would burst at a touch. And the physical symptoms fed off my disquietude about Pen, and vice versa, until I couldn’t even sit still, but had to walk around the room like a prisoner in solitary taking the only exercise that was on offer.

How long did someone have to be off the scene before they counted as an official missing person? A lot longer than half a day, surely. But it might be worth calling Pen’s sister Antonia, and seeing if she’d showed round there. The only thing that made me hesitate was the fact that Tony hates my guts and would curse me out loudly down the phone. She shouts a lot. Really, a whole lot; and I felt right then as though the wrong harmonic would just shatter me.

But I steeled myself to do it in the end, and I was actually dialling when the key turned in the lock upstairs. I put the phone down and headed up to ground level. Edgar and Arthur glided over my head, keen to get their word in first. They didn’t need to worry: I was fighting another bout of the shakes, and they could have beaten me at an easy walk.

When I got to the top of the basement stairs, Pen was bespeaking the door: talking to it in guttural undertones while touching the wood at the four cardinal points. Pretty much everyone puts wards on their doors and windows these days, to prevent unwanted visits from the recently deceased. Mostly they buy them in ready-made, though: photocopied stay-nots and tied-up sprigs of flowering herbs from the Camden Market spiritualist stalls, crucifixes and vials of holy water from the local church, mezuzahs and salats and cunningly modified Mani scrolls and every other flavour of religious prophylactic all readily available now by weight or piecemeal. Pen, though, makes up her own. She’s a pagan, and a priestess in an indie church that doesn’t even have a name. She keeps that side of her life very much to herself though, and I’ve learned not to ask.

The ward laid, she turned to look at me. It was a searching look that lingered speculatively on the clean shirt and the freshly sliced, mostly stubble-free chin.

‘Hey,’ I said, crossing over to her. ‘I was starting to get worried.’

She submitted to a kiss on the cheek, but I heard her sniff the air as I leaned in, so I knew she was still trawling for information on my sobriety and soundness of mind.