Then he looked round. He saw that he was somewhere new. Somewhere divorced from both those things and from anything real. He was in what looked like a cave … no, some of the walls were rock, but some of them were polished, tiled, like an underground station. Only this wasn’t a real tube station, but something like a stage set, with stark, powerful lights above … or was that him still being back at the club? He could hear the music still pounding up there, muffled. There was a hint of the railway tunnel about the arches above too. He could hear something through the wall, rattling past, carriage after carriage. He looked away from that; it felt as if death was very near. There were escalators at the back of the room that seemed to loop back on each other, in an infinite recursion. The floor looked to be made of newspapers, the headlines and type and photos changing as he looked at them, squirming out of his vision. He himself was standing on a slight rise, on a pile of objects. He shifted his weight as if he was still dancing, and some of them rolled down by his feet: a rotted gas mask; a banner for a coronation; a Victorian cartoon of someone he didn’t recognize wearing a sash saying something he didn’t understand; a skull with what looked like a spear point through it.

Someone was still holding him, he realized. He turned and looked, and the firm pair of hands released him, apparently now convinced he wouldn’t fall. The Rat King stood there, looking bemused at Sefton. ‘You have my attention,’ he said. ‘You’ve fallen here as so many other things have. You showed yourself willing to make the ultimate sacrifice. So I thought I’d do the decent thing: take you one step back in time and save your life. You’re welcome.’

‘Thank you,’ said Sefton. He had to sit down on the rubbish. He was shivering, breathing hard from the close call with death that a few moments ago he’d barely been aware of. ‘Where is this?’ he managed to say after a moment.

‘My home. Where all the detritus of London comes to rest. Where what was once significant,’ he held up one of the newspapers, ‘becomes mere panto.’

Sefton didn’t know what to say. He felt lost and desperate. He might have reached one of the ‘outer boroughs’, but this ‘Rat King’ had told him back in the bar that he didn’t know the answer to his most urgent question. He’d almost killed himself to get here – he could feel his body still suffering somewhere – and now it seemed that it all might be for nothing. ‘I-I was hoping to see—’

‘You were after someone else? Well, tough. You’ve got me. Cuppa?’