The meat sizzles on the grill, beginning to burn, but no one cares about that now. The park continues to bake in the sun, a hot wind blows through the trees, but everything else is different. They stare at him aghast.

He does not appear to be injured or in pain, and yet there is blood on his legs, on his bare feet. He looks up at the men, his eyes heavy-lidded and staring at them, as if from behind a pane of glass, screened off in his own world of terror. He raises his little hands, the blood already caked into his fingernails, turning rust brown.

‘Help me,’ he says.

JUNE

1

Leah

When they turn the corner on to Wyndham Park, Leah instinctively squeezes Jake’s hand. Excitement, a shimmer of nerves, goes through her as they hurry along the pavement. Jake’s hand gives an answering squeeze and, without having to say it, she knows he feels it too: how unbelievably lucky they are.

The flat they have come to view is in the basement of Number 14 and, from what they understand, it is theirs if they want it. Two days have passed since Jake’s breathless phone-call. Leah had been at work, going through the painstaking bureaucracy of filing a patent for one of the firm’s regular clients, when he had called with the news. Some guy Jake had met through a work colleague was looking for tenants to occupy the basement flat in his father’s house. Although it hadn’t been lived in for some time, it was spacious and clean, and the rent was cheap for the area.

‘What’s the catch?’ Leah had asked, an instinctive wariness rising inside her.

‘There isn’t one!’ Jake had said, laughing like a delighted schoolboy, and she had found herself caught up in the slipstream of his excitement, his infectious optimism.

All day, the heat in the city has been stifling. But here on Wyndham Park the air holds a rarefied coolness, the houses caught in the pinkish glow of early-evening sunlight. From the nearby courts come the pocking sounds of tennis balls being struck. The distant drone of unseen traffic comes from the main street beyond. Dogs bark and strain on their leads, sniffing around the oaks and sycamores, the chestnut trees that punctuate the green, while kids scoot over the asphalt that splits the park in two. Leah takes it all in – the park, the noise, the lush greenness of summer – and feels an unfamiliar jolt of happiness.

Fourteen Wyndham Park East. She turns the address over and over in her head, feels it humming hopefully inside her as they walk quickly, their footfall sounding on the pavement.

The owner, Mark, is leaning on the railings outside the house. He plucks the cigarette from his mouth as they approach. ‘All right, mate?’ he asks Jake, the two of them shaking hands.

‘Yeah. Good to see you. Mark, this is my girlfriend – Leah.’