‘No time, we’re late for a very important date,’ he said, pushing the table away from him and dropping a folded copy of The Times on to the bench.

‘Where are we going?’ I asked him.

‘It’s a surprise,’ he said, and he did not look me in the eye.

‘Shouldn’t we wait for the others?’

‘Not today. I can only take one person, the first one who came through the door. Unless Michael came through the door, of course, in which case I would have distracted him with faultless banter and taken the next person. Now, before we go, you are Austin Willis.’

‘What?’

‘Just repeat it. Who are you?’

‘Austin Willis?’

‘Perfect!’

I laughed at this, and I followed him out. We walked back down King’s Parade towards Corpus Christi, and turned down Bene’t Street. Like everything else about him, Francis was so singular in the way he put one foot in front of the other that you could always recognize him at a great distance, before the broadest detail of his face was visible. His shoulders were wide, and the muscle twisted down like a thick tree root from his neck to his shoulder blade, but you never noticed it unless he was standing still. When he moved, he was so like a child that all the heavy, masculine tissue seemed to melt away. He could not walk past a lamp-post without swinging on it, or a bollard without vaulting. He would sometimes run several feet in front of you, and then turn and walk backwards, still talking and somehow never stumbling into the people and objects behind him. He had the heedless grace of an animal, and like a wild animal he had no sense of social convention to check his movements. He would swoop down on gloves lying in the street, pick newspapers out of bins to read the headlines, and check his appearance in the plate-glass windows of passing shops. The universal curiosity which possesses children, and is generally satisfied by the end of boyhood, as if all surprises have been exhausted, had been sustained in Francis as a constant fascination with the material world. On that morning, however, his playfulness barely concealed an underlying agitation.

The two of us passed into the road opposite the giant grey slabs of the Lion’s Yard Parking, stacked four storeys high behind us. Here, the snow was already brown and slushy with morning traffic. We turned right, and walked away from the centre of the town, out where the buildings grew younger, like ripples growing fainter from the centre of a dropped pebble. At the New Downing site, Francis stopped me with a hand on my shoulder. The two of us stood in conference in the middle of the wet tarmac.

‘Listen to me, James,’ he said, ‘you have to do exactly as I say. And you have to be brave, do you understand? It’s halfway through the term. People’s stomachs have settled. If you show you’re afraid, or disgusted, they’ll know we’re fraudsters, and then we’ll have to run for it, or we’ll be arrested.’