Paddy Mac, back on the phone again. He’s checked up about the Viner Institute that the research-stuff in the conservatory said was in Aldgate. It might well have been, he says, but the whole area was bombed flat in the Blitz, and what little was left after that was wiped out by the developers’ building-boom of the 1960s. Nothing there. Nothing doing. Nothing at all.

He’s angry with me – thinks I deliberately wound him up, get him all excited about all of this, then make him look a total fool in front of all his colleagues. A laughing-stock, he says, his professional reputation shot to ribbons; might even cost him his business, he says. That bad? I doubt it, but…

He’s over-reacting, I know, but he’s so angry about everything that it sounds like he’s thrown the books on the fire. I hope against hope that he hasn’t – but I fear he may have done just that.

I feel like throwing this damn phone over the far side of the field. But I’d better keep it with me, in case I get any kind of chance to calm him down.