I drove down to the local town in a very different condition to that of the girl who’d vacated this seat at the wheel not ten minutes ago. That almost teenager, full of skippy excitement, trading one man in her head for another, was no more. This was no girl; this was a woman. A very tired one at that, hunched over the wheel. I tried to think. It occurred to me I’d thought very little about the intruder. At the time, the police had told me these sorts of break-ins were very common, about six a week in Fulham, they’d said wearily, and I’d sensed they thought they had little chance of catching him. Even though a run-of-the-mill burglary had stepped up to a murder inquiry, it was still the run-of-the-mill burglar at the helm: slippery as an eel, clever enough not to have been caught before, and not to be caught again. They’d gone through the motions of fingerprints – there were none, so gloved, I suppose – and I imagine there was no DNA either. I told myself to calm down, or as Imo would say, ‘Calm yourself, Mother,’ joshing me. I found myself wishing she was here, with me. Ned, too. But Imo was so good in a crisis.

I parked in front of the police station in the market square and realized it couldn’t look less intimidating if it tried, this little brick and flint cottage, in a small market town. It even still had its Victorian blue lamp above the door. It occurred to me that many years ago I’d taken my cycling proficiency test here. In the back yard, with a dozen or so other ten-year-olds from my local primary school, watched over by a kindly copper. There was no cause for alarm. I locked the car, went inside and gave the policewoman on the front desk my name.

A few minutes later a man in a suit appeared and asked me to follow him. That was when my heart began to thump. A plain-clothed policeman. And I was being taken to a room, not just details taken at the front desk. As he gestured for me to sit down opposite him at a small table, the same policewoman slipped into the room and stood in the corner. I breathed deeply, forcing myself to stay calm, telling myself there was nothing to worry about.

The policeman waited for me to settle. ‘Thank you for coming in, Mrs Palmer. I’m Detective Sergeant Turner, and this,’ he gestured at his colleague, ‘is PC Williams.’

I nodded and managed to look him in the eye. ‘I hear you’ve caught the burglar,’ I said conversationally, receiving it as the good news it surely was. ‘That’s good.’