Robin looked up. High overhead, above two encircling galleries of shops, an arching roof of white concrete beams and curved glass captured the last light from the sky and poured it down. In her day, anyone arriving by train at New Street had to exit the station via the Pallasades, a shopping centre of epic grimness, low-ceilinged and lit like a prison, its insides full of Woolworths and SockShop and crappy health-food stores, the outside decaying brown concrete. That was all gone – obliterated – and now, as if born in the light of the explosion, there was this, Grand Central, clean and white and imposing, like a modern cathedral or one of those Southern US mega-churches. A cathedral of commerce.

‘I can’t believe you haven’t seen it yet,’ Maggie had said when she’d told her where she was meeting Lucy. ‘It’s ever so smart.’

‘Yeah, Rin’s been boasting about it.’ She’d stopped. Every couple of minutes she’d focus on something else, forget, then it body-slammed her again: Corinna was dead.

She was ten minutes early but when the escalator delivered her to the café at the top of the new John Lewis, Lucy was already waiting. She had on the same scarf she’d worn at the Christmas market, and her hair was down over the shoulders of a short black coat. Cheap black trousers, slightly scuffed high heels – career-dressing on a tiny budget. She worked as a PA for a firm of solicitors, she’d said on the phone. ‘Family law – divorces, custody disputes.’

At close range, she looked barely older than Lennie. Under a ton of mascara, her eyes were round as a pre-schooler’s. Though it had looked near-perfect in the Facebook photo, up close and unfiltered her skin was teenage: a smattering of acne dints below the cheekbones, an active spot half hidden by a lid of concealer.

‘Lucy? I’m Robin.’

There was a hiatus, a moment in which the choreography felt off, a physical move missing. Of course: no badge, the extraction from the pocket, the thumb-flip that established her authority. Instead she took out the little Muji case Maggie had given her at the same time as a pay-as-you-go mobile. Robin Lyons, Private Investigator, MH Investigation Services. She watched the girl scrutinize the card.

‘Shall we?’ she said ‘Tea? Why don’t you find a table and I’ll bring it over?’

Robin could see immediately why Rin had liked the café. Industrial spotlights and tiles, painted farmhouse tables and outsized lampshades – it was her taste all over. But that was true of John Lewis generally: not flashy or designer, but good quality, solid. It sold the illusion of a trustworthy, comfortable world. The idea made her want to put her boot under a table, send its cake-stands and shortbread flying. Lies.