The story that dominated it I at first ignored because I’d noticed a paragraph at the foot of the page. It was only a few lines but it told me that the body of an unknown woman had been found on the canal bank at Paddington Basin the day before. The police were treating the case as murder. So it seemed that I had seen, or almost seen under its scarlet blanket, a murder victim. It made me feel a bit queasy. Somehow this was worse than if the woman had killed herself or accidentally drowned. That uncompromising black print repelled me, so I looked at the top of the page instead.

It was two years since I had read a newspaper. After the pylon and Daniel’s death I was in newspapers myself, first of all in the basic account of what had happened, my name, my age (given inaccurately as eighteen to Daniel’s sixteen), and my status as his “schoolfellow,” not his girlfriend. Then, in the days that followed, I was the subject of those articles feature writers produce on the moral or political aspect of things, that could all be summed up under the collective heading, “What Is the World Coming To?” In some of these features, I appeared as typical of eighties adolescents, amoral, feckless, so bored with the routine of life as to need perpetually to court danger, beset by a death wish. In others I was little short of a murderer, thoughtlessly taking the life of a weaker and younger friend. One speculated as to whether I might have been abused as a child, another if what I’d done had been “a cry for help,” and a third portrayed me as a victim of the drugs culture. My parents made a little collection of cuttings to give me when I came out of hospital, to show me the error of my ways. After that I never read another newspaper until that sunny morning sitting outside the café, drinking my cappuccino.

I’ve mentioned Andrew Lane and Alison Barrie before. They were the subject of discussion for the guests at the lunch party Max and Selina gave for my birthday. I had been uninterested then, but now I read the story because the photograph of these people and the child they were trying to adopt attracted my attention. It was bound to. Andrew Lane looked the way Guy Wharton might have if he was ten years older and had a beard. His was a solid square face but bright and lively with intelligent dark eyes. Beards cover up a lot, they are as disguising as a mask, so it would have been hard to say what his mouth was like or how big or small his chin. Andrew Lane had thick dark hair that was just frosted with gray but grew in the same shape as Guy’s with a peak in the middle of his broad forehead.