‘I was embarrassed,’ he continued. ‘After all these years you came back and we were …’

‘What?’

‘The same,’ he says. ‘I thought – I thought I was better than you. But I wasn’t.’

The words ring and lie suspended in the air for some moments, and I have to look away. When I turn back I see dust motes colliding with invisible forces, molecules directing them this way and that in the dying light. Brownian motion, I think, as we look at one another in silence. Tossed around by invisible forces. I’m shocked by how much I failed to see. ‘Seb,’ I say then. ‘You should have—’

Then the telephone rings and the sound of it lunges between us, impatient. Seb waits for it to ring out but when it doesn’t he answers reluctantly. A few seconds later he offers me the handset.

‘It’s for you.’

‘Hello?’

‘Xander? Good. It’s me, Jan. Have you got five minutes? There’s news.’

Immediately my heart begins to quicken. ‘Go on.’

‘It turns out they have the record sleeve, after all. They tested it for prints … there’s a partial print which probably belongs to the deceased.’ She pauses. ‘Then there are four dabs which the forensic scientist says are a good-to-strong match for yours.’

I feel the breath stall in my chest as the words filter through.

‘They survived? All this time?’

‘Not exactly. They did a routine set of lifts at the time.’

My prints. I hadn’t expected that. I was expecting his prints. The murderer’s.

‘Were there others?’

‘Some partials,’ she says, ‘but not good enough for a comparison.’

There is an answer to this lurking somewhere in the eaves of my brain. Jan carries on explaining about partial prints but I’m trying to focus on finding this reply. How could my prints be on there? Suddenly, there is a glimmer of something and when I tease it out the answer is there. ‘Wait. My prints. Yes. Of course, there were my prints. The record. I bought the record for her.’

The line is dead for a second.

‘Okay,’ she says slowly.

‘The letter,’ I say. ‘It’s in there: thank you for the gift, she wrote. That was it – the record was the gift I’d bought her.’

‘That could be any gift—’

‘No, she says … You know how much I love Jack. She said it. Jack is the record – Jack T. And when I play it. It was the record,’ I say.

There is a pause. ‘We’d need to prove she was talking about that specific record.’

It is so obvious. But she sounds uncertain.

‘All we have for certain is your prints on the record,’ she says. ‘That’s the evidence.’