I took my diaries with me to Max’s, then to Silver’s, back to Suffolk, then to Beryl’s, to the various colleges I went to, to the flat we had in the East End and finally here, to our home. Most of the entries, naturally, were written in the first person. All but one. And that, which chronicles the most terrible thing that had ever happened to me up to that date, I seem to have written in the form of a short story. Why? All these years later I can’t remember writing it or what reason I had for writing it. I had no literary ambitions then or at any time. What I do now and what I love doing must be as far from being an author as one can get. I wonder if my counselor suggested that I write it all down as an exercise in therapy, or if, later on, the psychiatrist I was referred to after my conviction told me to do it and write it as if it’d happened to someone else. I don’t know, I don’t remember. I’d even forgotten that I’d kept it and it was only seeing Liv again that made me search for it and the papers that were with it.

The call from a Mrs. Clarkson had come in the afternoon before. Darren, who works for me, took the message (or one of his girlfriends did) and sent it over by e-mail along with all the other calls for the day. He was tied up, as he put it, with a rewiring job, which brought me a picture of a very handsome lithe black man struggling to escape—like Leviathan, was it?—from coils of cable come alive like snakes. So Mrs. Clarkson and her dimmer switches in Downshire Hill were left to me and I made her my first call.

I live, and have lived since just before I got married six months ago, in the penthouse on top of a block of flats in Highgate. The view over London is stupendous. I can step out of my living room onto my roof garden. The only thing about it I don’t much care for is the underground car park. It could be worse, though. There’s no part of it from which you can’t see between the concrete uprights that support the block to the light and air outside. Besides, I’m a lot better about enclosed spaces now. I’ve even been in the car wash all by myself and sat there with the soapsuds blinding me and the brushes slurping and the red darkness enclosing me like the belly of a whale.