The officer wearing the camera and this Ebadi speak for a few seconds. Ebadi is smiling at first, and then there is a look of concern, confusion even. He nods after a moment and waves the police in without hesitation. But I know why that is. He doesn’t care about the police coming in because the body has been moved. He will have cleaned the place up so confidently that twenty-four hours later, the police are being ushered in without pause. Either he knows that the police will not find anything, or he’s calculated that his chances are better if he lets them in now, so he won’t have to see them return with warrants flashing.

The footage runs on until Conway presses pause, and I, too, freeze. My mouth drops. I stop breathing.

This cannot be.

The feeling I have now is of the world coming to a halt on its axis. It seems like the Universe is crashing past me at speed. And I am just standing there, motionless.

It’s not the same feeling as the one I had after Rory. That was disbelief. Reality had been exposed simply as mist.

I feel myself mentally leave the room under the pressure of the moment.

Rory.

Pulling at me again.

We didn’t really recover from our teenage fighting. We tried, as adults, to relegate the past into insignificance, but instead it began to invade all our spaces and push us apart whenever we tried to draw near. It didn’t matter whether it was neutral ground or not, it seemed like neither of us could cross the bridge to reach the other. I wonder now whether I could have tried harder, but when I put myself in that space, I remember that I did try. I went to his new flat soon after he bought it. He never came to me. But I did go to him.

I arrived at his building in Ludgate Circus, bringing with me the heat from the street. It was one of those buildings that had been ‘reinvented’. Traces of a former glass-warehouse or coffee-vault or some kind of faded glory were there deep in the brick. And now, crowding and rocketing land prices had polished the rust away and called it new.

An old lift clanked into place and I remember the smell of it as I pulled the concertina gate across and waited as it lurched between floors. My pulse quickened as it always did when I was in a confined space. Then finally, after those slowly ground-out minutes, the doors opened.