I’d have raised my eyebrows when Buddha was invoked. For me there was a simpler equation in the greenery of south London: it was a break from the grind. I think about this and wonder if that’s where it began, this need to escape my life? I don’t know. But we held hands here, I know that. ‘We should buy a place here somewhere,’ she said.

‘We should. We really should.’

‘Somewhere we can grow old together. And you can garden and I can bake.’

I laughed and drew her into my coat. I remember it now. ‘I don’t really see you as the baking sort,’ I said. She pulled away in mock indignation.

‘Hey!’ she said, before adding, ‘but what about that loaf I made once?’

I marvel at this now when I look back, that she’d loved me. When I examine myself for the same glints of beauty and magic that I saw in her, I can’t find them. She said I was honest and gentle. But most of all that I was brighter than her – that’s what attracted her most, she said. Clever men were hard to find, apparently. I rough over this memory because I know how fraudulent this claim of hers is.

From the café I circle round and head out towards Dulwich Park just across the way. There’s a fence around the perimeter edge but the planks are weather-worn and have come away from their nails. I pull a section back and step through into the vast grounds. I let my feet lead me. As I walk I have the sensation of being followed, but when I glance behind me, there are only trees.

The police seemed more interested in the Squire attack than in the woman lying dead in that house. It can only be because they don’t believe me. Did I look unhinged to them? I keep catching myself being hunted by ghosts – is that what they saw in me? I should have insisted on going to the house with them, because what if she’s still alive. Is there some sense in calling an ambulance, even now?

I shake some of the fug from my head. There’s still pain there but it’s ebbing away. To my right the ground climbs up a hill which I follow. The wet grass smells of my childhood and of Rory. If I can help it I hardly ever indulge Rory any more. I push him out whenever he draws close but sometimes, like now, when some scent catches me by surprise, I am taken bodily back to him. This wet grass and suddenly here he is, six or seven and rolling down a hill. Squealing. And then in the next instant, he is no longer six or seven but twenty-six. At the end of his life.

When he was twenty-six, Rory was found dead.