For as long as I had known Edie Wren, she had been involved with a married man. I had seen him once, a good-looking man in a suit and tie, like a politician who wants your vote, no spring chicken – the far side of forty – but a handsome man who knew it and who had always known it. I had only glimpsed him in a doorway for a moment. But I saw his wedding ring. Or perhaps I imagined that I saw it. But it was there.

Edie Wren’s married man. Mr Big.

I could not, off the top of my head, even remember his real name. But I knew with total certainty that he was too old for her, and that he was too married for her and that he was nowhere near good enough for her. He did not deserve her and he did not deserve to be the father of her child. I felt an anger and grief that I could not explain. And I felt totally absurd at the depth of my feelings.

Why can’t you just wish the girl well, Max?

I looked at her, and she was fingering the small crucifix around her neck. Edie Wren was London-Irish Catholic. And nothing in the world would stop her having this baby.

‘Congratulations,’ I said, looking away. ‘I guess.’

‘What’s wrong with you?’

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Here she comes now.’

Asuman Jenkins was perhaps thirty, but her dark face was lined with exhaustion and made her look years older. Under her black unbuttoned North Face jacket you could see the light blue uniform of an NHS staff nurse. She was fiddling with her key in the front door when we came up the concrete garden path.

‘Asuman Ata?’ Edie said.

She turned to stare at us, a look of horror on her tired face.

‘Jenkins,’ she insisted. ‘My name is Asuman Jenkins.’

Our warrant cards were in our hands.

‘Please,’ I said. ‘There’s no need to be alarmed, Mrs Jenkins.’

‘But we need to talk about when you were Asuman Ata,’ Edie said.

We followed her through the front door. I thought I knew these houses but inside it was more compact than I had imagined. I had been spoiled by my years in a Smithfield loft, living in more space than me or my little family would ever fill. But in the tiny box-shaped living room where the widescreen TV was exactly the same size as the sofa, three was a crowd.

Edie and I sat on the sofa and Asuman Jenkins perched uneasily on the footstool of a La-Z-Boy. It is not her chair, I thought, as her knees almost pressed against mine. As she sat there in her light blue uniform, I tried to imagine her as the young woman who had been smuggled into the country.

‘We understand that you entered this country illegally, Mrs Jenkins,’ Edie said.

She immediately stood up.