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The taxi turned a corner, and suddenly we were on Pike Street. The Manhattan Bridge was right in front of us, bathed in orange sunset, arching across the East River to Brooklyn.

“No, no, this isn’t right! What the hell are we doing here?” I shouted, shoving my head through the gap in the cabbie’s bulletproof-glass partition. “I want 91 Clinton Street, it’s back by Delancey. You’ve come way too far down.”

I threw myself back on the seat, cursing for not having paid attention. Instead I had been rummaging in my bag for a phone number—a date I wanted to cancel—which I still hadn’t found.

The cabbie did a U-ie. I looked at my mobile. Shit. It was 4:30 p.m., already forty minutes since I’d left the office and less than an hour before deadline.

“There, that way, go that way.” I stuck my head through the partition again as we crossed East Broadway. “It’s definitely north from here. In fact, give me a map. Have you even got a map?”

Infuriatingly unperturbed, the taxi driver handed me a battered Street Planner. Under my terse instruction we clanked back up Allen Street, over Delancey, turned down Stanton, and crossed five blocks, finally hitting Clinton. I saw immediately the numbers were too low, but we couldn’t turn right.

“Bugger, stop. Stop!”

I handed back the map with a wad of dollars and slammed the taxi door. Then I slung my bag on my shoulder, and for the fourth time in a week found myself sprinting down a New York street in high-heeled boots. Fate, for some reason, made me late for everything.

I could tell immediately which block I needed by the crowd of people amassed on the pavement ahead—shopkeepers, residents, passers-by, all lingering with the sheep-like curiosity that follows an accident, staring at the building across the street as if some new calamity were about to burst out of its windows.

“NY1 News” and “Channel 7 Eyewitness News” had set up camera tripods by the curb, their cameramen looking across the road and smoking cigarettes. I felt tempted to go beg for a smoke, but there was no time.

Three cops were keeping the crowd to one side of the street and number 91 was opposite—an open black door, sandwiched between a Dominican barber’s shop and a Chinese toy store, that led up to a five-story walk-up apartment block that had a rusting black fire escape zigzagging down its front. A woman wearing a navy-blue windbreaker with “Medical Examiner’s Office” emblazoned in yellow on the back guarded the doorway. That meant the bodies were still inside.

Panting now, I weaved my way through the gawkers, checking for other reporters. Then I spotted them, the only white guys on the block. They stood a few yards down the street, gathered around a burly, bald man in a beige detective’s suit and scribbling earnestly in their notepads. Shit, the press briefing and I was missing it. I dodged a cop and sprinted across the road towards them, pulling my notepad out of my bag as I went.