‘I suppose I’ve spoken to everyone except you, by now.’ James looked down at the pavement below. A small area was still fenced off with tape, where he had stood with the policewoman and said: No, I didn’t know her, I’d only met her on the train. And what were you doing on the edge of the bridge with her, the policewoman had asked. Would it be all right if I sat down, James had asked, could I maybe have a cup of tea, I’m not feeling too well. Slightly to his surprise they’d taken him to a café; she ordered him tea, and a glass of water, and found him a charger for his phone. Even as it recovered battery life, a number he recognized was pulsing on the screen: a landline. 0117.

‘Mum was the first person I spoke to,’ James continued. It felt a little odder than usual, addressing his father in their meeting spot like this. But everything felt odder than usual. He hadn’t slept, he supposed, for thirty-six hours. He had never intended to be standing here. This was an afterlife, of sorts. Whether that was a good thing, he couldn’t be sure yet. ‘She was very happy. Relieved, I suppose I mean. I didn’t quite realize how emotional she would be.’ Nor had he been prepared for the way Karl dissolved when he walked into the café, manhandling James so hard that James almost fell off his chair and the policewoman asked, ‘You definitely know this man, right?’ Or the way that Sally had answered his call on stage, in Australia, and not only started to cry but – apparently – turned it into some sort of parable even during the speech, and ended up with a standing ovation (she’d sent him a video, which had ‘gone viral’, though she was careful to add ‘that’s not what this is about’). He hadn’t been prepared to hear Michaela’s new boyfriend shouting, ‘Oh thank God, thank God’ in the background. He’d been taken by surprise – surprise and embarrassment – by the amount of work Steffi had put in, by the sheer size of the collective effort she had helped to trigger. When the embarrassment faded, he ought to be grateful for all this; it ought to disprove what he had thought about himself. Maybe that would come later.