I should see her, I thought, suddenly, and I realised I was increasingly doubtful that people would always need love and music. I wasn’t even sure exactly what I had been selling all these years. I had had a dream that romance would be only the start, and that Angel Eyes could eventually connect the world – not only potential lovers but employers and job seekers, house hunters and sellers, holiday homes and tourists, the lot. That was the dream I had – connecting the world. And the bitter truth was that I had not even been able to find my homely, kind-hearted friend one half-decent date.

‘Tara?’ Skyla said, and there was fear in her voice.

There were loud shouts outside, a growing frenzy, as if someone was working themselves up to violence. Night was falling and there were dark shadows on the mews, directly across from our office, their hoods pulled up, hiding their faces.

‘Punish the guilty!’ someone screamed.

So they were not just bored kids who had found an unoccupied corner of the city. They knew all about me.

‘Michael, lock the front door and close the blinds.’

But Michael was slipping on his pre-faded denim jacket and clocking off forever.

‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘Tara. It’s been a blast. But this shit is not worth half-pay.’

And he ducked out the back door as Skyla and I stared at each other. Then a brick came through the big plate-glass window and we flinched under a spray of broken glass.

The brick skittered across the floor and landed at my feet and it wasn’t a brick at all. It was a bottle and the bottle was full of colourless liquid that had a burning scrap of rag stuffed in the neck.

For a long moment it smouldered like a damp firework as the stink of petrol filled the room. Then the fire suddenly caught with a rush of air and spread across the floor like water.

Skyla was instantly on top of it with a fire extinguisher but then there was another one, smashing against my desk, and bursting into flames immediately, while on the screen, all those hopeful faces kept smiling as my business burned.

Later, much later, Wiggy covered his face in his hands and I held him as he cried his heart out. Apparently, all those thousands of LPs in The Vinyl Countdown had acted as an accelerant and made the fire burn fiercer and faster. Our end of the mews was quickly consumed by flames and was now a blackened husk, sodden and steaming. A lone fireman stepped through the gaping hole where the front door of Angel Eyes had been. The office was already unrecognisable, just a charred shell of what looked like a pathetically modest space, too tiny for all my big dreams of connecting the world, but beyond the shattered windows of The Vinyl Countdown you could still make out the bright primary colours of album covers that had been swallowed by the flames. We watched from the end of the mews until the roof collapsed, and then they ordered us further back.