And that music, through some path I can’t untangle, takes me back to Grace and when I first saw her. It was Freshers’ week. Arriving at the college, I had the sensation of having finally sloughed off a battered old skin. There was no sadness in leaving Mum, Dad and Rory behind. In no time at all I was at a desk signing up for a student union pass. I had just put the pass into my pocket and turned around when I saw her. Just there, standing behind me.

‘Grace Mackintosh,’ she said. The person at the desk checked her name on a long printed sheet and frowned. She repeated her surname and he found it.

‘Oh,’ he said, looking over at me. ‘You’re in the same class.’

I froze. She smiled at me and all I could do was stare at her, a white-blonde sun. That was how it felt, as if I was being bathed in her radiance.

‘Hi,’ she said, ‘I’m Grace. This is Nina.’ Nina was the darkness to Grace’s light. Sharpened slate, to Grace’s softened curve.

‘Hi,’ I said. ‘I’m Xander. Xander Shute.’ And once again I couldn’t move.

‘Xander Shute?’

I look up.

‘I am arresting you on suspicion of assault occasioning grievous bodily harm. You do not have to say anything but it may harm your defence if you fail to mention when questioned something which you later rely on in court. Anything you do say may be given in evidence.’

‘What?’ I say.

‘Sorry, sir, I am going to have to place you in handcuffs for your own protection.’

I recoil but his movements are so practised that my resistance is futile. The cuffs are heavier than I had imagined they would be. As they go on, the cold steel makes me shiver.

‘I am now going to search you. Do you have anything on you that could cause either of us any injury?’

‘What?’ I say again. ‘No.’

He gets down into a crouch and begins to pat around my legs moving slowly upwards.

He stops. He takes some surgical gloves from somewhere and puts them on. I do not know what he thinks he has found. My lighter?

‘Charlie,’ he says down the corridor to another police officer I have just noticed. ‘Get me a weapons tube. I’ve got something.’

My heart skips. The knife. The old drunk’s knife.

‘That’s not mine,’ I say, too quickly. ‘I found it in the park.’

A few minutes later the other officer returns with a Perspex tube. He deposits the knife into it. Evidence. How have they connected me to the woman’s murder so soon?

‘What’s going on?’ I say, but even as I say it I know something is wrong. Grievous bodily harm.

She must be alive. Still.

8

Wednesday