She considers this and I can tell she is weighing up how much she knows, which isn’t much, against what she doesn’t know, which is a lot. In the end she has no words to offer me.

‘You should look at the boyfriend,’ she says, and suddenly I am aware that my face has gone cold.

Boyfriend. That’s what the police said. They suspected the boyfriend. But that the boyfriend was me. Even now, the idea of her having a boyfriend who is not me hurts.

‘Who was the boyfriend?’ I say. I think of the other man in the house that I saw, strangling her. There was someone else after all.

‘You’ve forgotten?’ she says, eyebrows raised.

‘Did I know?’

‘Yes. It was the yoga guy. You must remember. Ariel.’

It comes washing over me. The smooth, easy manner. The oiliness of him. That smile. That wafting about in fake serenity. Our arguments. My jealousy.

‘She was seeing him?’ I say, incensed.

‘Oh,’ she says, quiet now. ‘You didn’t know.’

I feel hot tears beginning to pool in my eyes as I shake my head. She stands behind my watery screen, not moving.

‘She didn’t love him,’ she says. ‘It was a rebound.’

The words reverberate. I can’t believe it – after all the arguments we had about him. The baseless jealousy I was accused of. But she went to him. And then the pettiness of my reaction climbs in. She is dead. Grace. Gone – killed. And she could have been ended by him – that stabs at me most.

And then it seems to me that this can’t be true. The man who killed her had a suit on as if he had been at work. It couldn’t have been him. Ariel didn’t wear suits.

‘Ariel didn’t kill her,’ I say.

‘I didn’t mean he killed her. I meant I think he might have the money. He’s the only other person who might have known about it.’

The words settle on me and then begin to soak through. And the truth of it starts to wake me. I close my eyes and sink to my haunches on Nina’s step, eyes clenched, trying to think. There is something in the back of my memory about this. I try to reconstitute that evening. Those flickering flames against the wall. The song.

I’ve had trouble with my memory

And less with my back

But the vision of a girl on my mind won’t go away …

I stoke up the scent of burning logs in order to revive the memory. He said something, didn’t he, about money? I heard him calling across the room to her. Champagne? he said. Something about celebrating. Celebrating what? she said. And then it came out: the money.