The Shed nightclub was to her left. Mary first hurled there, just before her first kiss, which was beside the Co-op. She and Darren O’Donohue were into each other for a while, despite the vomit snog, but his family moved to Canada to feel more joy. Darren had menopause boobs now, too.

She’d proposed to Roddie at the Granary, which was to the right. Not proposed so much as apologised for a girly weakness and suggested a show of hands.

Nostalgia was making Mary lose revenge-momentum. She put her hand up to block out the karaoke pub she and Roddie frequented in their early forties, and the organic grocer’s she and Roddie decided to frequent in their twenties but never did. They should. If they made it through this, they should buy their veg from there. And they should eat veg.

Mary pressed the service buzzer, not expecting the door to open at this time of night. Thankfully it did, because plan B was to scale the back wall, creep across the green and check the back door, and if that was locked she didn’t have a plan C. By the time she knelt by the small pot plant on Liam Macdowall’s landing, she’d forgotten why she was at a dead client’s flat, in the middle of the night, suffocating a pen drive with her palm.

The device had become very hot. She didn’t want to look at it, but she couldn’t let it go.

Even if she put it in her pocket it’d be better, but she couldn’t. She might well know someone on it. Renfield had exploded a century or so ago, and the shards of its population of weavers had since whirled around the area, colliding, exploding again. There was no such thing as serendipity in Renfield, because seemingly chance events were never beneficial. There was no synchronicity here either, because events were never meaningful, no matter how many you had in a row. Good people had lived good lives here, and their descendants were doing five-hour shifts to get a food voucher. Faces swirled before her, of the children she’d known over the years. Vanny could be on the pen drive. How often did her mother leave her alone? How many foster carers did she have? Christopher Senior might well be on it, although he’d have been Christopher Junior then. Maybe even Mary herself was on there. If it was a lifetime’s work, it wasn’t out of the question. Mary shook herself. She couldn’t remember a camera on either cold-floor occasion, but she couldn’t remember much at all really, other than genital stimulation, to her shame.