Time travel at York railway station was easy-peasy. By crossing from one platform to the other and boarding the north-bound service to Oban I was transported back to circa 1982. This filled me with delight. I could now make a live comparison of the service offered by CrossCountry Trains that afternoon from Bristol Parkway with that of my undergraduate heyday.

Earlier on I had confidently declared in a Facebook status update that the only improvement in 30 years was the addition of power points at the seats. Otherwise standards were either very similar, such the same kind of delays, or much worse. That day I was particularly appalled at the lack of a restaurant car in a vehicle that was carrying people from one end of the country to the other, the infrequent trolley service that offered over-priced snacks of no nutritional value, and a last-minute decision to by-pass a couple of advertised stations in a bid to travel faster and achieve a decent arrival time at the final destination.

However, I was destined for disappointment as soon as I took my blue and red tartan seat on the Oban train. It would not be possible to make a fair comparison because this was not an Intercity 125, but a local service. A further realisation then hit me: it was going to take forever to reach Edinburgh in this quaint, yet ancient, vehicle.

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This was serious, dead serious. Piecing together the evidence that I heard on Radio 4 while lying ill in bed I discovered that BD hid an extremely shady past. I’d noticed that he hardly spoke about his childhood and now I knew why: much of it had been spent in a secure unit for the criminally insane.

On Saturday morning I courageously set off to BD’s flat where he and his wife served a special once a week brunch to the locals of Leith. I would find a way of letting him know that although Winifred Robinson had blown his cover, I would keep his deadly secret safe.