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‘If Kenny’s girlfriend had left, why was the son still living with him? Didn’t he move on with the mother every other time she switched boyfriends?’

Nicky shrugged. ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘That seems to have been the pattern. But not this time. This time she hit the road and he hit the concrete. Everyone leaves the nest sooner or later.’

I found I wasn’t in the mood, somehow, for Nicky’s flippant little homilies, but as I opened my mouth to launch a put-down a nurse stuck her head in through the door and called out ‘Five minutes!’ in a ringing tone to the room at large.

‘Man, you should ask for a cavity search,’ Nicky scoffed. ‘That’s all you’re missing for the full institutional experience.’

‘That and some decent food,’ I reminded him. ‘Nicky, did you get anywhere with that drawing? The teardrop thing?’

‘The shiny vagina? Not so far,’ Nicky confessed grudgingly. ‘Still working on it.’

‘Okay. I want you to do me another favour.’

‘Well, Jesus, what a surprise.’

‘Gwillam.

Find out where he lives.’

Nicky’s eyes lit up, but he couldn’t resist the cheap shot when it was sitting there right in front of him. ‘I thought that was Humpty-Dumpty territory,’ he reminded me.

‘It is. But hey, they cracked me once and I didn’t break. Not all the way. So now it’s my turn.’

‘Then I’ve got some good news for you.’ Nicky reached inside his pocket, fished out a folded sheet of paper and waved it in front of my face before dropping it onto the sheets. ‘I took the {s.

poc liberty. He hides himself pretty fucking well, and it took a while. But it was a labour of love.’

I unfolded the sheet. It was an address in St Albans: The Rosewell Ecumenical Trust, Church Street.

‘That one you get for free, by the way,’ Nicky added.

‘Truly, this is the ending of days.’

‘Get well. And get bent.’

He walked away with a laconic wave, and I immediately turned my attention to the papers he’d left me. Not Gwillam’s address - that would keep - but the incident reports and statistics.

They would have made dry and difficult reading even if I’d been in better shape than I was. Nicky’s hacks get him into all kinds of interesting places, but he usually loses a certain amount of formatting along the way, so I was facing vast blocks of prose with pretty much no punctuation apart from line breaks.

And in that typographic ocean, dark shapes moved of their own volition, against the sluggish tide.