I took a deep breath as Kristi came into view. She was sitting up in bed, a pillow propped behind her, a thin hospital quilt pulled up to her collarbone. The right side of her face was covered with a bandage, which wrapped around her skull and across her chin. Her lips were visible through a slit in the bandage. Only the upper left-hand side of her face, including her undamaged eye, was visible.

She fixed that eye upon me now and said, in a weak, restricted voice, ‘Hello?’

‘Hi Kristi,’ I said, in what I hoped was a friendly, light tone. ‘How are you?’

She looked at me, her eye blinking slowly. I cringed.

‘How do you think she is?’ Dita asked.

‘I’m sorry.’ I turned back to Kristi, who picked up a beaker and sucked up some juice through a straw. I noticed that there were no cards or flowers beside the bed and wondered how many people she knew in the UK. Would she go back to Albania after this? I found her future impossible to envisage. But I knew it would involve pain and suffering. ‘Have they caught the person who did it?’

Dita replied for her. ‘Fucking police are not even looking. Why do they care about some immigrant?’ She spat out the last word.

Kristi said something to her in Albanian and Dita said, ‘She is asking what you want.’

It had dawned on me that by coming here, I was making myself a suspect, particularly in the eyes of these two women. And what I needed to ask Kristi would seem strange to say the least.

I spoke to Dita, while continuing to look at my former cleaner. She had been so beautiful. It’s easy to say that beauty is only skin deep, but I imagined myself trotting out that cliché now. It would be like a barb in her heart. ‘I need to ask Kristi something. I want to show her a photo and ask if she recognises this person.’

I thought that, if Charlie had been behind the attack, she would have had to follow Kristi at some point so she knew her route home, which would tell her where to lie in wait. The report had said that the attacker was a man in a balaclava and black leather jacket. But wouldn’t it be easy for a woman dressed like that to be mistaken for a man? Especially if it happened quickly, in the dark, and the victim was half-blinded? I wanted to know if Kristi had seen Charlie.

‘I need to know if you ever saw this woman,’ I said. Dita translated.

I brought up my girlfriend’s photo on my phone and held it close to Kristi’s face. She reached up with an arm that was also wrapped in bandages and took the phone.

She scrunched her one visible eyebrow. ‘Your girlfriend,’ she said in English.