What to do, except pull up the file on his tablet? Work entices the mind out of despair: This way, this way. The more he feels the urge to sling a rope over the pulley on the garage ceiling, the harder he works. Back to the realm where it is painless to ask questions; where you may find answers.

Not yet, though. This case is new. April Smith, nineteen. Named by a mother skittering on the skid-pan of her life: creator of a girl – for she is barely a woman – whose name and face now dominate the news. An unfathomable photograph, courtesy of the police, who care to capture only height, build and distinguishing features. Standard procedures have robbed him of access to anything deeper. Where he would read her – those small dark green eyes – she is walled off, defiant. Violent, even. He wonders whether it’s police policy to goad suspected perpetrators into looking culpable. Or simply the unconscious result of their certainty in the suspect’s guilt: the certainty that is necessary for the arrest to occur in the first place.

Across the aisle, the father of the three-year-old has caught a glimpse of the photograph and is trying to read upside-down. Bloody idiot. Logan means himself but unwittingly speaks aloud and the man flinches. The file is confidential; he must move to first class and pay the extra should the guard return. Although Logan is thinner these last few months, he feels heavy. Bumping even momentarily into grief, his body grows sodden and sullen: blood thickens and slows, neurones clog with resistance. Effort is required to drag himself to the more comfortable seat where he can read alone.

April is saying nothing to anyone. Not even her defence team. But he has her diary. Opened at random, it is almost poetry… if poetry were hatred. But such contained hatred. Not the page-tearing, crossed-out scribbles of the enraged, the psychotic; no capitalized words, no vicious underscoring. Just a steady, girlish hand unleashing its controlled, cursive disgust. Another random page, and she is reporting a conversation with the Almighty.

Dear God, tell me through my left hand, what can I do with my anger?

Followed by a page of scrawl he cannot read.

It’s getting rare to see something written by hand. Young people don’t do that any more. They’re on keyboards at six, manually illiterate by twelve. Even teenaged diarists use apps. An echo of something he said to, who was it?