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The message that arrived a few minutes later directed me to Pudding Mill Lane station, on the Docklands Light Railway. It wasn’t a quick journey, and I had plenty of time to read through the incident report on my phone. Apparently a woman had made a 999 call claiming to have seen some kind of firefight on the station platform. The British Transport Police had shown up, found nothing, concluded that it had been a wind-up, and buggered off. Which was the end of the story as far as the authorities went, but the Keepers have listening posts in the police, and the report had raised enough flags to warrant sending someone over . . . though apparently not quite enough flags to send anyone important. I wasn’t sure what I was going to do when I got there, but I supposed I’d just have to find out.

The Docklands Light Railway (aka the DLR) is one of the more unique ways to get around London, a raised railway crowded with small driverless red-and-blue trains that link up all the places in East London where absolutely no other lines go. It has four branches, winding and intertwining, and it can take you anywhere from Lewisham in the south to Stratford in the north or all the way eastwards towards Woolwich. I was on the northern branch, heading towards Stratford. Pudding Mill Lane was the last station before the Stratford terminus, and when the train arrived no one got off apart from me.

DLR stations are very lonely compared to the Underground. The DLR was designed with automation in mind, and just as the trains don’t have drivers, the stations have the absolute bare minimum of staff. This one had none at all, and there were no passengers either. The station was a single-platform design with rails on either side, and all around was blackness. Pudding Mill Lane was right in the middle of what had once been the Olympic Park, the great centre for the London Olympics. For a few weeks the square mile in which I was standing had been the busiest place in London, but now it was a giant construction site, a jungle of concrete and fencing and metal scaffolds, abandoned and empty. Beyond the railway to both east and west, the land dropped away into half-constructed buildings, lying silent and unused. The old running track had been torn up and now was a giant heap of dark earth, filling the air with the scent of mud and water. According to the plans, this place was going to be turned into housing eventually, but there wasn’t anyone living there now. Scattered towers rose up all around, and to one side I could see the skyscrapers of the Stratford skyline, an oval-shaped tower looming over us with a ring of rainbow neon glowing at the top, colours shifting from blue to purple to green. To the northeast, the Olympic stadium was a squat shadow in the darkness. Cars rushed along a main road to the east, but they were half a mile away and nothing else was moving. Despite being in the middle of the largest city in the British Isles, I was completely alone.