She must want a referral, of course. And so I began wondering who I knew who could do something like that. You’d need to think about architecture and society, about history and mayhem. Ideally, then, someone who’d seen some history rather than just read about it. It would be all too easy to create a sort of off-the-shelf fascist playpen for her game, and that would look fine but it would ultimately go stale. It wouldn’t convey nearly enough of what she had said. The game must be organic, each aspect of the look driven by the deep shadows of the concept, and the look would have to weave in and out of what was happening in the story, tonally and thematically. You’d have to imagine it in every time of day, in different weather conditions, and each of them should somehow have an uncanny feel: hard, inhuman edges and misapplications of scale; uncompromising anti-architecture. There was a building I knew in the centre of town that had a little of what I wanted, a white concrete thing all shelves and angles that, in the right combination of rain and wind, gouted sudden torrents of water on to people below. It could feel like being assaulted if you were in the wrong place at the wrong time, and the owners had had to apply for permission for a sort of bus-shelter awning all along the pavement, so now the whole front of the building at ground-floor level was dark most of the year and stifling in the sun. Yes. That, only more, so much more. That for the soul.