Lou was in the middle of a trial when I called the number on the card. I was glad; these were the times I was most invisible to her. Lou always got anxious during trials, often too anxious to eat. To offset this, in the weeks before one commenced she’d force-feed herself junk food. She went for whatever was most dense with calories: boxes of doughnuts leaving their snow of powdered sugar over her documents, Nutella eaten straight from the jar. KFC was a perennial favourite. She liked the colonel’s face, she said. It was a face you could trust.

Lou’s anxiety also made her sweat. To combat this, she would buy a pharmacy-strength deodorant and roll it all over her body every morning. I’d come into the living room and she’d be sitting on the couch, papers strewn across the coffee table, rolling deodorant on the soles of her feet.

‘I don’t think you’re supposed to put that everywhere,’ I’d say, watching her take the deodorant that had just been on her feet and drag it around her hairline.

‘I know what I’m doing,’ she’d reply.

At night during trials, Lou would come home and start drinking – not wine, or even beer, but Midori, or Baileys – and continue until most of the bottle was gone. She unscrewed the smoke detector and smoked indoors. She slept in her clothes.

She didn’t have any attention to spare for me. Her radar was elsewhere. And for this call, and for what might follow, I wanted privacy, to have space between me and her shrewdness, her indignation when she sensed I was keeping any kind of secret.

I called in the middle of the day; there was nowhere I needed to be. To fill my time now that school was over, Lou had badgered one of the barristers at her chambers into giving me a part-time job, which mostly involved either photocopying documents or shredding them. But other than the desultory ten hours a week I spent watching the green bar of light in the photocopier move back and forth, or the shredder turn evidence into noodles, my time during business hours was my own. I was safely alone, but I put the chain on the front door just in case.

To my surprise, a woman answered.

‘Oh,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, I must have the wrong number.’

‘Who did you want?’

I stared at his name on the card, already foxed at the edges from all the handling I’d given it.

‘Aleks Korsak,’ I said, getting a weird squeeze of pleasure from saying his name.

‘One moment,’ she said.