Another message landing, with a little electronic plop, in the pond. Another useless one. This is terrible, what are we gna do? What indeed, thought Steffi wryly: thanks for your input. But there were possible breakthroughs, too. A gossip journalist had been in touch, via Michaela: she claimed to have a phone number for Hamish Elton, the client James had been fired over. Steffi and Michaela had been pinging messages back and forth. It seemed like Michaela was either somewhere where it was tricky to text, or she was just a bit incompetent spelling-wise, because some of her messages were like your grandmother might send with her Nokia. But then, Steffi couldn’t imagine what this would be like if you loved James, or had loved him. If you felt responsible. Well: yes, she could. She did feel a little responsible.

She remembered him sitting there, in the chair right opposite, big shoulders hunched. It was so disorientating to see him crying. It would be strange with anyone, but he was so far from the emotional type. ‘I just don’t understand what I’m doing wrong,’ he’d said. ‘What it is about me that’s wrong?’ Stuff just gets like this sometimes, Steffi had said. It’s how life goes, isn’t it, she’d said. I’m sure you’ll get a better job. I’m sure you’ll meet someone. What else was she meant to say?

They hadn’t been insincere words, either. With the limited data she had on James, it seemed fair to think that he was a good man, deserving of whatever sort of change of luck he needed. And Steffi imagined that, on the whole, people did get what they deserved, even if they had to wait around for it. That was what you were generally led to believe by fridge magnets and memes. They were all about keeping going in pursuit of your dreams, seeing out the bad times. None of them implied that there could be an outcome in which you just admitted the bad times had won.

It was just hard to believe that he’d been here in this very room, thinking about it. That he’d been sleeping the other side of the wall, planning it, perhaps looking up ways to … and she with all her amateur-sleuth pretensions had picked up on nothing, had taken none of the opportunities which must have existed to make him see sense.