Despite the cold, I lowered the window as I drove carefully past and explained that the superior handling characteristics of a four-wheel-drive vehicle were as naught if one were deficient in basic driving skills.

‘Did you see any injuries?’ I asked Guleed. ‘Do you think we should stop?’

‘Nah,’ said Guleed. ‘Not our job and anyway I think that was just the first of many.’

We saw two more minor collisions before we reached Sloane Square and the snow was already piling up on the tops of cars, the pavement and even the heads and shoulders of the pedestrians. By the time I’d pulled up outside the blocky red-brick exterior of Belgravia nick the traffic had thinned down to a trickle of desperate or overconfident drivers. Even the surface of Buckingham Palace Road was white – I’d never seen that happen before. I left the motor running while Guleed climbed out. She asked if I wanted her to take the bowl but I told her no.

‘I want my boss to look at it first,’ I said.

Once she was safely out of sight I hopped out of the Asbo, opened up the back and pulled out my Metropolitan police issue reflective jacket and, because below a certain temperature even I’m willing to sacrifice style for comfort, a maroon and purple bobble hat that one of my aunts had knitted for me. Once I had them both on I got back in and headed west – slowly.

James Gallagher had been studying not at the brand-new state-of-the-art main campus in King’s Cross but at the smaller Byam Shaw building off the Holloway Road near Archway. This was, according to Eric Huber, James Gallagher’s tutor and the studio manager, a good thing.

‘It’s far too brand-new,’ he said of the main campus. ‘Purpose-built, with all the amenities and lots of office space for the administrators. It’s like trying to be creative inside a McDonald’s.’

Huber was a short middle-aged man dressed in an expensive lavender button-down shirt and tan chinos. He was obviously dressed these days by his life partner, probably a second, younger model if I was any judge, the giveaway being his untidy hair and his winter coat, a cracked leather biker’s jacket, that had obviously come from a previous era and been pressed into service because of the snow.

‘It’s much better to work in a building that’s evolved organically,’ he said. ‘That way you’re making a contribution.’

He’d met me in reception and guided me inside. The college was housed in a couple of brick buildings that had been built as factories at the end of the nineteenth century. Huber proudly recounted that it had been used to make munitions during World War One and thus had thick walls and a light ceiling. The students’ studio space had once been one large factory floor but the college had divided it up with white-painted floor-to-ceiling partitions.