He can feel Flora breaking through like a radio signal, some disturbance in the airwaves, a distress call, a sudden swell of mental violins. He is being jolted against his will into the soundtrack of a tragedy and he won’t have it. He starts to hum – quietly, wary of being heard – one note after another. The resultant tune feels falsely jolly, deliberately trivial, a distracting melody you might muddle through as you committed some white-collar crime: fiddling the books, shuffling a justified claim to the end of the pile. Flora goes away.

Back to the page of scrawl. Though he cannot read it, there are words there. One of them looks like explode. It could be a metaphor: I’m so angry, I could just – Handwriting experts will be employed; transcripts produced. In the meantime, he must read April: immured, uncooperative April. He stares again at those frozen eyes. She isn’t there. But in the diary she is vivid. Only the left-hand portions, the portions where she is speaking as God, are unreadable. Fitting, he thinks, for the Great Author of the Mysterious. Speaks in tongues, writes in scribbles. The rest is as neatly inscribed as any bright girl’s homework. Daily, for fifteen and a half months, she has emptied the contents of her mind onto the page to produce this incriminating document. To quell the baying of her demons? To order her thoughts? To empty herself of pain? Or to justify her intentions: this astonishing, mouth-gaping crime? He swipes the notepad app, types a lucid exploration of obsessive misanthropy.

He imagines April in a student study bedroom, lying on the duvet on her stomach, inscribing her hatred with slow deliberation. The summer has dragged its residue heat into early autumn and a window is open; there is laughter outside. April records it with a sneer. Through the breeze-block walls of the halls of residence, a muffled gasp marks the crescendo of somebody masturbating. April records that too.

Foul cynical onanist next door at it again, she says. Name of Rick, but he’s more of a Dick. Ogled my tits while I scrubbed HIS burnt porridge out of my pan in the kitchen. Now wanking. Also fits. Dawkins fanatic. Arrogant atheist wanker asked if I wanted to join their Righteous Non-Believers’ Society.

Me: No.

Dick: You’re not a nutter, are you?

Me: Just don’t think Dawkins knew what he was talking about.

Dick (to three other housemates): Nutter.

General hilarity.

For the next half-page, lying on her belly with a halo of sunlight, April catalogues all the lines she failed to deliver in the communal kitchen. She is acidic. She is logical. She is devastatingly clever. But in the kitchen, she was silent.

Rick is one of the dead.