The carpet is pale beige. It is clean and soft and probably the last thing she walked on. There is little in the way of furniture. A small pine wardrobe, a television screen attached to the wall, and a four-poster bed of shiny fake wood. The white sheets are so tangled I cannot help but imagine the aftermath of recent sex. It makes me think of another room, and another tempest of a bed, in a faraway house that rests on top of a plague pit by the sea.

‘What do you see?’ The voice is Maxine’s and she is talking to me.

‘The bed doesn’t go.’

‘I mean the woman.’

What I had wanted to say was that the mess of the bed doesn’t go with everything else in the superhumanly clean and empty house. ‘Nobody could die that neatly, in such a messy bed,’ I say.

She is naked, as far as I can tell, though the quilt hides her middle, going from the top of her thighs to the upper edge of her breasts. She is delicate, and probably a few centimetres shorter than I am, though it is difficult to be sure with her lying as she is. Her arms are by her sides, resting above the quilt and curved like parentheses. Her legs are as straight as a ballerina’s, though her toes are not pointed. I wonder if she was arranged in this position before her body grew stiff and cold.

I can’t look at her face. I put my hand to the side of my right eye to stop myself. I am too afraid, and I do not care if Maxine and Tess know it.

‘Were you wanting to say,’ Tess asks, ‘that the messy bed is out of place in context with the rest of the address?’

‘Yes.’

‘Be back in two minutes.’ Tess hurries from the room.

I crouch by the side of the bed. I long to smooth her hair. But again, I am too frightened that if I do I will see her face. If I were alone, I would tell her how sorry I am that I failed her, that I didn’t do enough to help to find her in time.

Where have you been, I silently ask, for the last six years?

My hand curls around hers, an impulse to comfort somebody who is beyond help. Even through the thin blue gloves they made me wear, I can feel that her warmth is gone. She is the temperature of the pine wardrobe. I remember imagining how my baby would pink up, as I fantasised about her birth. What has happened here is the opposite of pinking up. The hand in mine has lost its softness, its human sponginess. There is no give any more. The give, the warmth, the pinking up, that is what makes us human. But this hand is a plastic doll’s.