She left at one and soon after I set off for GUP and my interview with my supervisor. To face the music but also to get advice. I went, as always, down the steps into the little garden in Warwick Avenue, through the shrubbery and out onto the canal bank. That something was wrong I could tell before I had gone under the bridge. On the other side of it, blocking the path, were a barrier strung with blue-and-white police crime tape and a policeman and a man in plainclothes who might have been another, standing in front of it. I stopped, looked at them and beyond. Up ahead, just behind where the flyover passes, at the point where I normally left the canal bank, were more policemen and something lying on the towpath. I couldn’t see any part of it but it was obviously a body. Someone had covered it with a big scarlet cloth. The policemen standing beside it were laughing about something and that shocked me, though not as much as the prospect before me.

“Use the underpass, will you, love,” the plainclothes man said. “Just up there and cross the road.”

I said I knew where it was, considered asking him if he’d let me through, saying I wouldn’t tell anyone and I wouldn’t linger, but I knew it would be hopeless. So I went back the way I had come and crossed Warwick Avenue. It was one-fifteen and my appointment with Caroline Bodmer was for two. If it hadn’t been for that and the hoped-for resolution of all my difficulties, I’d have gone back home. I wouldn’t have considered the underground route. Even so, I sat on a wall and thought about it. I sat there for a couple of minutes and told myself that I had made great strides toward conquering my claustrophobia at old Mrs. Fisherton’s. I slept well, in spite of being in bed in a more or less subterranean room. I hardly ever felt the walls were closing in and crushing me. Panic no longer drove me to run up the iron staircase or lean out of the window and stare at the sky. I disliked the place but I was living in it, it was bearable. I got up, crossed Howley Place, and went down the ramp to the underpass.