Despite the officer’s implication that the attack I’d witnessed on the Heath and the brick through my window hours later were most likely unrelated – if indeed she had believed me that either event had actually happened at all – I can’t ignore the tightening in my chest as I walk – every car horn, every bustling body a threat as I move along Kentish Town High Street.

Unable to shake the unbidden soundtrack in my head, I toss the half-smoked fag in the gutter and enter the loudest pub I can find and order a large whisky, allowing my thoughts to be drowned out by the churning of the crowds. It’s the same pub where Maureen and I had first met, just a couple of streets away from the refuge she runs, but today as I scan the bar she is nowhere to be seen.

Once the drink starts to take the edge off, helped along by the half of Xanax I slipped into my mouth as I left the police station, the anxiety clinging to my chest loosens its grip.

Regardless of what the police officer had suggested, what I had seen was more than a lovers’ tiff. Still conscious of the breath drawing in and out of my lungs, I work through the facts in palatable fractions. What had I really seen?

Wrestling with myself, with the other memories that threaten to overshadow this one, I allow a picture of the girl’s face to form; concentrating my mind on the area around her head, her face moving more clearly into focus as I do so, like a magic eye picture taking shape. Swallowing a mouthful of whisky, I see her eyes blink open and shut, her face white and glazed over. As the image gains clarity, it shifts so that suddenly the eyes in front of me are someone else’s, and now it is all too much.

Unable to differentiate between the two events in my memory, I feel a pair of hands grabbing my shoulders and pulling me away.

No, get off me!

I don’t know I’ve spoken aloud, but when I look up the barman is standing in front of me, proffering the bottle, a concerned look on his face.

‘No, you’re all right, Ted,’ I say after a moment, pushing my stool back. ‘I’m going to head off.’

‘OK,’ he says, every eye in the pub turning to watch me leave. ‘You take care of yourself.’

By the time I arrive back in Camden, a police cordon is stretched across two bus stops opposite my flat. I recognise the officers guarding the area from a glorified puff piece I was forced to work on a while back about community policing initiatives, as part of management’s attempt to ingratiate itself with the local force.

‘PC Allan?’ I say, fixing him with my best smile as I approach. ‘What’s going on?’