‘Bring Seb along,’ Bel said on the phone, evidently distracted. ‘Hang on a sec, Johnno, can you?…The more, the merrier, I say. It is the bloody Last Supper, after all – might cheer things up … That one next, please … And I’m dying to meet him properly before I go … Oh my God, no, not that one … Look, sorry, Mag, but I think the removal men have just packed Hannah in a crate as a truly hilarious joke. I’ll see you later, all right?’

I put the phone down slowly. I wasn’t sure I was ready to introduce Seb to the curious throng at Bel’s farewell dinner. I was so dreading these goodbyes that I would have much preferred the Gershwin gig, but I couldn’t abandon my best friend on her last night in the country. Seb said he quite understood of course. I’d known he would, he just seemed that type of man. He said that rehearsals were over-running anyway, they were having problems with the blocking (whatever that was). I very nearly asked him to meet me when he finished but as I teetered Seb said, ‘I’ll call you soon’, and I said ‘Great’, when what I really meant was, ‘Wait’ – and by then he’d already gone.

When I left work the rain had stopped at long last, the pavements glistening like molasses under the streetlights. It was freezing again, a proper winter chill cutting through the air, and for once I was glad, my masochistic side craving the cold tonight. My head felt fusty, almost dirty, after the last few days’ events – the graffiti and the texts, the calls to Gar, coupled with creepy Joseph and Donna’s missing book. The icy bite outside roused me again. It wasn’t far to the gastropub Bel had booked for dinner. I stuck my headphones on and set off for Clerkenwell.

I’d spent the afternoon in the office pretending to ignore that last text, although DI Fox’s sandy face kept popping up to chide me, my hand hovering over the phone constantly to call him until I decided not to be so weak. But now, tramping alongside the rush-hour traffic, the chill here thick with fumes, those vicious words resonated round and round my head … SLUT, WHORE, SLUT, WHORE.

Who hated me enough to try to scare me witless? Whoever it might be, they were succeeding.

I crossed the road, squeezing between a minibus and a small lorry, a cyclist skidding past in a luminous vest like a raver from the nineties. With Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor soaring in my ears, I was starting to feel quite trippy myself, my mind speeding from one suspicion to the next. Joseph? Charlie? Philip Lyons? Don’t be ridiculous, Maggie. I shook my head again, impatient with myself. None of them, surely. But – Alex?

I kept arriving painfully back at him.