‘No. A proper job. He was an insurance guy or something,’ he says. ‘It’s true he was a yoga instructor but only ever part-time. I don’t think Grace would have gone out with someone who was just a yoga teacher.’

He had a job? I sit back in my seat and take some more whisky in. So he killed her. Then he took the money. The thoughts swill around my head, trying to get traction on something.

‘That’s where I was this evening.’

He looks at me in confusion. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I was trying to track him down. What happened to him? Did you ever see him again?’ I say, sipping some more. The whisky burns my chapped lips but the pain is welcome.

‘After Grace died? No. He just vanished. Although—’

‘What?’

‘He wasn’t really our friend. We didn’t know him, as such, beyond what Grace told us about him. Met him twice in total, I think.’

‘I have to find him,’ I say.

He turns to me with a raised eyebrow. ‘Good luck with that.’

‘What do you mean?’ I say.

‘What are you going to trace him with? You don’t even know his name, do you?’

‘Ariel. It can’t be that common a name. And now we know he was in insurance.’

‘Xander. I don’t think Ariel was his real name. I think it was like a yoga name. When I met him, he called himself something else, though I can’t remember now what it was. It was something less frilly, like Harry or James.’

This stops me mid-breath. I haven’t even considered that Ariel might not be Ariel. My body starts up a mild panic. ‘What the hell am I supposed to do now?’ I say.

I close my eyes and there is silence. All I can hear now is the pulse of my blood in my ears beating out a percussive drum. I stay this way, perched on an abyss until I hear Seb moving across the room. My ears wade through the sounds coming from the other end of the room and I look up. Seb is shuffling through records. I close my eyes again. How am I going to find a person without a name?

I hear the wisp of a record leaving its sleeve. A low static hum, velvety and rich. It is the sound of a cinema before the screen lights up. The sound of anticipation. A soft amplified thud. A hiss and then in glorious technicolour, sound comes rushing in waves across the room.

There’s trouble on the uptrack

And trouble going back …

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