‘He kept looking over at this young girl, I mean, young woman,’ said Jamie, who was, to give him credit, visibly shaken in his bomber jacket and necktie. ‘He kept saying he was going to go over and talk to her, and everyone was, you know, laughing at him. She was sitting at a table with this guy; Rupert kept saying she was out of his league. And then there was a crash from the window. It was the protestors outside.’ There had been, Quill had gathered, a major Toff gathering outside the bar that evening, something approaching a flash mob, swiftly brought together by Twitter. There were enough youths with those masks in this suburb to do that now, he supposed. ‘They’d thrown a dustbin or something. So we all cheered and waved to them, you know? The bouncers – sorry, security staff – went out there and talked to them. Some of the lads in here – and I don’t agree with this, okay? – they got out their wallets and started waving their cash at them, and pointing to themselves, and they got this chant going, “bankers” … “wankers” … pointing back and forth. Really stupid. Everyone was texting and tweeting about it and, you know, wondering if the police were even going to show up, what with this strike vote and everything.’ Quill was sure that his expression hadn’t revealed anything, but the young man stopped and looked awkward. ‘Sorry. Anyway, that’s when we started to hear the sieg heils from outside, and we realized there were bloody skinheads … well, not real skinheads now but, you know, that lot, they were out there too, and they’d started to fight the Toffs. You could see them outside the window, laying into them, chasing each other across the square, getting into scuffles. There were cheers from in here, not for either side, really. Anyway, I looked back and Rupert had gone over to the woman at the table, had gone to chat her up. That was Rupert all over. The bloke she was with just got up, looked at his watch, didn’t seem like he wanted to get in the way of that. More of a business drink than a date, I got the feeling. But I still thought it was a bit odd that he didn’t want to make sure Rupert wasn’t going to hassle her.’

‘Did she respond well to Rupert’s advances?’

‘It looked as if he was getting somewhere. She was smiling, anyway.’

‘What about the bloke she was with?’

‘He headed off. I didn’t see if he actually left.’

‘What happened then?’

The young man paused, and Quill, through experience, knew that now he was at the point where the impossible had intervened. The boy was trying to navigate through what he could say that might be believed.

‘Just tell the truth.’