‘Yeah. I’m good. I just – I don’t know. It’s not just Karen. So much stuff has happened recently. I think it all just hit me at once.’

‘What else has happened?’ Tilly asked. ‘Apart from your accident.’

‘Accident?’ Henry asked.

I told them everything. Falling – or being pushed – down the steps at the Tube station. My new job being scuppered when Victor was arrested for being a paedophile. The weird stuff with Sasha and Lance and the ‘You’re Dead’ text. How I was sure I’d been followed, as had Charlie, and the guy staring at me in the cafe that afternoon. Charlie losing the bag of mementoes.

‘Even my cleaner,’ I said, remembering. ‘She was attacked in the street – someone threw acid in her face.’

‘What, the really pretty one you told me about?’ Tilly said.

‘Yes. Now this, with Karen.’

Henry had been watching me solemnly through the whole tale. Now he nodded. ‘It sounds like that neighbour was right. Something has attached itself to you.’

‘Henry,’ I said. ‘With all due respect, that’s bullshit. I really don’t believe in all that stuff.’

‘Then how else do you explain it?’ he asked, pointing at me with his fork.

‘It’s just bad luck.’

Tilly seemed far less bright than she had before my laughing-crying fit. ‘That’s a lot of bad luck, Andrew, for one person.’

‘Maybe. But I’ve always had bad luck. Right back to Mum and Dad . . . And my detached retina last year.’

‘Perhaps it’s a curse,’ Henry said seriously. ‘You haven’t crossed any gypsies, have you?’

I spluttered. ‘Please. You’ll set me off again.’

The waiter brought the dessert menu to the table. I didn’t want anything. All I wanted was to get drunk, and I downed my third large glass of red wine.

‘So,’ Henry said, after he’d ordered key lime pie with cream and ice cream. ‘All this stuff that’s happened – is it since you’ve met your bird? This Charlie chick.’

‘You think she might have something to do with it?’ Rachel said to Henry. As our designated driver, she was stone-cold sober.

He shrugged his massive shoulders. ‘I don’t know the girl. But it seems like a lot of this stuff has happened since Andrew met her.’ He addressed me. ‘If you don’t believe in spirits and curses, there are only two possible reasons: one is sheer chance, or bad luck as you say. The other is that someone is behind it.’

‘That’s even more ridiculous than blaming a gypsy curse or an evil spirit,’ I said.

But even as I said the words, I felt something crawl beneath my skin, an itch in my head, like the questions that had darted around my head since I’d heard about Karen’s death were trying to connect, to knit together.