I am in the kitchen, giving Seb some space. I need space, too. There are thoughts to pack and curate. Which to preserve and which to consign? The telephone rings, piercing the silence. I put down my mug and answer it.

‘Xander,’ the voice says. ‘It’s Jan.’

‘Hi,’ I say. ‘I thought it might be you.’

‘Did you? But you didn’t think it might be clever to tell your lawyers before you walked into a police station with evidence in your own murder case?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I thought you might have stopped me.’

‘Too right I would have.’ She breathes heavily into the phone as if composing herself. ‘Anyway, they found a print.’

My heart sinks. In the gap of time that opens out, I see that today might be the day that I have to take those last steps. I was never expecting good news. The fact that I had the record at all after all these years is enough to convict me, but still the news shocks me. In the quiet of the line a ringing starts in my ears.

‘The print would have degraded by now,’ she says. ‘But only a normal print. A surface fingerprint from sweat might last a few days,’ she continues, ‘but that wasn’t your print. Your print was visible.’

Your print. My print.

‘It was in blood.’

The chemicals rush to my temples and I want to drop the telephone but instead I hang up and sink to the floor. The silence begins to gather itself again and collect around my ears. The whine starts as a low hum and then steadily gets louder. Soon it is so loud that the walls around me are bouncing the sound of silence into my head.

I have to leave.

I walk faster and faster until I am almost running. People on the pavements slip and slide away from me as I bowl through. I can hear my voice, squeezed and scratched, shouting out at the pedestrians. ‘Move! Move!’ I say, ploughing through them.

This is wrong. Through that one piece of evidence delivered straight to the police, I had stopped and surrendered, confessed my guilt. Why, now, am I so surprised? The truth, I realise, is that even at the point I had handed the evidence to the police, I wasn’t sure what was me and what was my imperfectly stitched-together memory.

I can’t let this fractured mind of mine fracture my resolve, though.

Something like this happened before, with Rory. When he jumped. I remember it clearly now, how I felt when I heard about it. If only I’d been there, I might have been able to stop him. And now when I reconstitute the memory, I remember being there. I remember seeing it unfolding before my eyes.