The detective runs the tips of his fingers over his knuckles like an old-timey villain ready to punch someone. ‘You’ve been arrested on suspicion of the murder of Amy Blahn. What can you tell me about that?’

I sigh. I am tired and I need someone better to be asking these questions or nothing is going to happen. ‘It’s not a great question, is it, Officer? Do you want to be a bit more precise?’

‘Did you murder her?’

‘No.’

‘How do you know her?’ he says then, picking up the pace.

‘I don’t know her. I’ve never met her.’

‘So you have no connection to her at all?’

I hesitate. What is a connection after all? Did I know her? No. But was I connected to her? Of course I was. Everything that has happened in the past weeks has confirmed nothing if not that. ‘No.’

He takes a breath now and looks down in his hands as if he is reloading. ‘Then what you were doing with her on that rooftop? And how did she end up with a hunting knife in her chest?’

It seems so simple when you see it on the TV. Just tell the truth because life deals in and values truth. Life is there to help you find ways to achieve some perfect resolution. Just tell the truth. What could be easier?

I touch the scar on the back of my hand. It’s the thing that makes me doubt, more than anything else, that it took place in the way I think it did. I remember this injury and how it happened differently from how he does. In his mind it was one way, but in mine I’m certain about a different version, and so I’m confronted now by this problem of more than one truth. The scar hasn’t healed properly; it flares sometimes in the night. Throbbing, burning. It might not ever fully heal, but isn’t that the point of a scar? To mark the slings and arrows?

As I trace the jagged line I meter out in my head what I need to say and what I can’t. And which parts of it might have to be recast. I see the detective looking and immediately hide the mark under my hand.

‘Fishing knife,’ I say firmly, but it’s not enough to distract him.

A chill enters the room from somewhere under the metalframed door. It makes me shiver. The detective folds his hands and waits, the picture of patience.

‘Take your time,’ he says and as if to prove he means it, he leans back in his chair. Dogs bark in a distant street far below. I had always assumed these places were soundproofed but the sound is all around, leaking in, like poison gas.

‘Take your time,’ he says again. The permission he implies – it annoys me.

‘Officer –?’

‘Metcalf. Detective.’