Marilyn didn’t really do emotion. She winced and looked away. ‘Oh, love, I don’t know, it’s awful, isn’t it? Poor little Sam.’ I heard the break in her voice. ‘Such a terrible thing. She was such a lovely person – I can’t think who’d want to . . . well.’

A lovely person who had screamed at me in the street. Marilyn didn’t know about that, I assumed, and I wanted to keep it that way.

I put on my plastic apron and opened the door into the pens area, which always smelled strongly yeasty, like a pet shop. The dogs went wild to see me, some even throwing themselves at the bars, barking and yelping. A sound I still found upsetting, after all this time. Bars. Locks. ‘Shh, shh now.’ I reached through to stroke a few heads, murmur soothing words. These dogs had been through hell, some of them. Starved or beaten or left in a sack at the side of the road. We rescued a lot from the lakes too, tied up or weighted down with stones – and then there were the drowned ones, the ones we didn’t find in time. Why would you do it like that? If you’d decided something had to die, that its life was nothing but cruelty and pain, wouldn’t you at least give it an easy end? Trapped in a bag as it slowly fills up with water – I couldn’t think of many worse ways to go. And I’d seen several.

Katrin – one of our interns, veterinary students we used as unpaid employees – was setting out feed bowls, her fair hair wrapped around her head in intricate braids. She glanced at me in a way that told me she knew the police had spoken to me. Probably everyone knew.

I forced a smile. ‘Morning, Katrin.’

She nodded. She had her headphones in and I could hear the tinny blare of music. I didn’t like that. I felt that if you were with someone they deserved your full attention – but perhaps that was me showing my age. Katrin was almost twenty years younger than me, after all.

‘Have you done this side yet?’ I bent to pick up some of the bowls she had filled from a huge sack of dried food, the meaty smell filling the air, driving the dogs wild.

‘Oh. Not yet.’