She saw no more because Vincent didn’t slow, herding her on towards the kitchen at the end of the passage. Along the way, she glanced at a series of beautiful framed photos, clearly Vincent’s moody work. Night-time scenes of softly lit moonscapes and mistscapes, a point of humanity in a sweating winter window, the contours of a face rendered abstract by neon and darkness. They were unmistakably his pictures; she recognised a couple of the images from the selection he’d shown her on that first weekend. The prints in real life here on the wall, liberated from the tinted phone screen, expanded to incredible life. The darkness was like a warm blanket, the mist like a swaddling shroud. Thinking of her own wavering, uncertain creativity, she admired and envied his distinctive vision.

The kitchen was lit by a too-bright pendant lamp over a small oval table that served to cast the rest of the room into jarring shadow and smelled of cold grease, saturated fish batter. The mouth of the kitchen bin gaped, full beyond the brim with crumpled paper and plastic. Dirty dishes and a couple of half-crumpled beer cans were piled in the sink. There was a fluorescent strip light on the ceiling and Petra wanted to find the switch for it, bathe the room in a more kitchen-like light, as if it might chase the dirt off the plates and the stale smell out of the room along with the shadows. But she held back as Vincent sat in a straight-backed chair at the table.

‘Come sit, please,’ he said, gesturing at the chair next to him as he shoved the mugs and bottles away and more carefully moved his camera and notebook aside. He angled the laptop screen towards her. ‘Look what I saw.’

Stop, she wanted to say. First tell me where you went on Friday night. You shouldn’t just get away with ignoring me and then showing me your cat memes or whatever the hell you want to show me without apologising first. But his urgency was compelling, and under this harsh light his face was even more leached, there were beads of sweat on his brow – there was something wrong with him. So she held her tongue and looked to the screen, hoping she’d get the chance to have a normal conversation later.

The computer was a decent brand, but pretty old, and the screen was scuffed and spotted, from this angle reflecting the light back from a glass-fronted cabinet. ‘Do you mind?’ she asked before she touched his computer, something that struck her as an awkwardly intimate invasion. He nodded and she re-angled the computer, adjusted the screen, but still she didn’t see what she was meant to be looking at. The photo on the screen was mainly dark with just some blurred patches in the lower right-hand side. A brighter shaft of white light cut across the top third.

‘I’m not sure what I’m looking at,’ she said.

Vincent leaned over and hit the cursor, cycling through a series of stills of the same blurred shapes. As a series, she could see that the photographer had approached the white slant and the indistinct shapes gradually – the smudges got bigger as he progressed and seemed to be moving just a little, leaning in towards the centre of the frame perhaps – but just as she was starting to discern some direction in the smudges’ movement, Vincent flicked through the images, jittering forward and back until the shapes just looked like random smears again.