He comes to me like this, the full span of his life in a single slide. Childhood – adulthood – death. When I think of him the memories tug something inside. He fell from the eleventh floor of his apartment block in Holborn, but I’m not sure if I trust all the details of that memory or whether it’s a pastiche of imagined and real. But I do remember roaming the parks with him for hours on end when we were children, with a ten-pence piece for an emergency phone call just in case.

When I went to identify the body, I was alone. There was nobody left to me, no one to absorb the despair when it flowed over. Dad had been in a care home for over a year. In patches of lucidity he remembered Rory and in those moments, just as the scales fell from his eyes, and he learned again for the first time that Rory was gone, he’d crumble. His face would collapse, then his chest and finally, if he was sitting in a chair, he would sink to his knees and howl. And I would stand there, watching – with pity, but also with bitterness that he couldn’t help me. It wasn’t consolation, exactly, that I needed, but something to drive away the numbness.

Now as I sit with my back against a park bench, my heart beating fast, that feeling invades me again: the emotionless feeling of isolation. I coax some heat into the sleeves of my coat by rubbing them and think how I am the warmth of my life. How much energy life generates just to be and to continue being, and then when the time comes, as it did for Rory, the furnace just … stops.

I have to beat away the existentialism. Getting up, I tighten the coat around me and trace a path to the main entrance, walking quickly towards it. The ache in my temples has returned and is clouding the few thoughts that I have. She is dead, I know it. I remember now that I felt for her pulse and couldn’t find one. So I let her life be taken. The heaviness of that realisation crests over me. I don’t know anything about her. Who she was, what she did. What her name was. Her face presses up against my skull, becoming slowly, painfully familiar. I need to know more about who she is – was. And who killed her.