“Then what is wrong with you?”

He put his head in his hands and said the sentence I would hear, in one form or another, eleven more times over the next four months: “It just happened.”

“Things don’t just happen at 12:36 in a booked room,” I said.

And then somebody knocked on my front door hard enough to rattle the storm glass.

It was Patricia.

Marcus was behind her, still in his work jacket, unshaven, having clearly come straight off a night shift.