The Dead Pass by Colin Bateman (Headline 2014

I make a habit of grabbing any and every excuse not to do the right thing, which in this case was going to see what was likely to become my step-grandchild, helpless and gurgling in hospital, instead of wasting my time with a rain-damp old woman who'd taken an eighty-mile bus ride to see me. It's the nature of me. And I don't mean in a good way. But I am a helpless slave to avoidance. So I said to the woman that I'd try and track Dan Starkey down and if she wanted to pop into the cafe across the road I was pretty sure he'd be down shortly.

'Order a pot of tea for yourself,' I said, 'and a Diet Coke and two German biscuits.'

'I don't like German biscuits.'

'They're not for you,' I said. But I gave her the wiseacre smile I had perfected over the years, calculated to charm and defuse any situation; you would have thought that over those years I might have realised that actually it doesn't have that effect, that usually it makes matters worse. But no, only in retrospect. But I'm a great one for perseverance, as bad guys usually discover, so I kept at the smiling even though she wasn't getting it at all. Maybe she had her mind on other things. She nodded at me, then trundled off.