‘Fine. I’ve got the list from your agent of where you stayed while on tour. I’ll avoid places you’ve been before. Chances are they’re beyond our budget anyway.’

‘And we’ll have our own rooms? I mean, separate? No twin rooms to save money?’

‘Of course not.’

Thank God for that.

‘Once we’ve identified the event venue we’re looking for, we’re also going to need to go to whichever hotel you stayed in – the narrow bed hotel – to check it’s the right one.’

That was the main one I didn’t want to revisit. Damn.

‘Simon wants to know for sure. He said you should positively identify both: venue and hotel.’

This was an opportunity, I told myself, to learn a hard lesson: namely, that you couldn’t have everything you wanted all the time. All you could do was force strangers to buy you your favourite kind of crisps and pretend that was all your dreams come true at once.

‘You’re not keen to revisit the hotel?’ Charlie asked me. ‘How come?’

‘It was hardly the Savoy.’

‘We can just walk in, you say, “Yes, this is where I stayed,” then we walk out.’

We could walk in? Was she going to insist on coming into the room with me? God, that would be embarrassing. Unless …

‘Let me tell you now and get it over with,’ I said. ‘Any hotel room I go into, whether I’m spending the night there or just popping in, I have to take a book into the room with me and put it in a drawer. If there’s a Bible in the room, I have to put my book in the same drawer as the Bible. If there’s no Bible, any drawer will do.’ My face radiated heat as I spoke. I’d have found it less embarrassing if I’d had to admit that I travelled with a bag of sex toys.

‘Really?’ Charlie wasn’t smiling. She didn’t look as if she was preparing to mock me. ‘Which book? The same one every time?’

‘Yes. It’s called Delirium of the Brave. By Terence Nithercott. I guarantee you won’t have heard of it. Please don’t ask me why I have to take it to every hotel with me. There’s literally no reason. The book has … had … sentimental value. Soon after I got it, as a present, I took it with me to a hotel because I wanted to try and read it – turns out it’s unreadable – and then it kind of became a thing. A mascot, or … I don’t know.’

Why was Charlie Zailer suddenly paying such close attention to my every word?

‘What would happen if I said, “I want you to go into hotel rooms without that book from now on”?’ she asked.

I shrugged. ‘I’d probably take the opportunity to persuade myself it’s turned into an irrational obsession, and now’s a great moment to break the habit.’