I replaced the receiver. Two minutes later I was driving towards Turnmill Street.

At Audrey’s peeling front door I stood and waited to be let in. I banged with my fist on the blistered paintwork and when nobody came I crouched down and peered through the letter box. It gave me a view of the murky hallway and its piles of junk and the door that led into her back-room sanctum.

‘Jack!’ I shouted, but nothing stirred.

Under the trees of Turnmill Street the shadows were powdery with dust. Two girls walked past Audrey’s gate, looking curiously at me. Their heels clicked on the pavement as they passed out of sight beyond the neighbours’ privet hedge. I banged and shouted again through the letter box. Then I saw Audrey emerge and walk very slowly up the hallway. I straightened up at once but the letter box gave a tell tale rattle. The door jerked open.

‘Didn’t you hear me knocking?’ I asked. ‘I’ve come to pick Jack up.’

Audrey looked pale. Her hair hung in grey wisps beside her jaw. She hesitated, then half turned away from me. ‘Jack?’ she called, into the dim house. ‘Jack?’

I saw him backlit against the yellow glow from the end room, but he didn’t come any closer. I had no choice but to slip past Audrey into the hallway. I negotiated the lumber that blocked my path to Jack and when I reached him I saw that his face was swollen and shiny, and his eyes were puffy with crying.

‘What’s wrong? What’s happened?’

Jack’s mouth twisted as he bit his lip, trying to hold back more tears. I could sense Audrey close behind me and the shadowy house rearing above us. ‘The cub’s dead,’ he whispered.

‘The cub?’ I repeated stupidly.

He couldn’t stop himself crying and it was to Audrey he looked for comfort, not me.

She put me firmly aside. ‘Come on.’ She took Jack’s arm. ‘Come on now.’

‘He was run over. We let him out in the garden just like always,’ Jack sobbed. ‘And then he wasn’t there and he didn’t come back, and when we went to look we found him lying in the street. He was squashed.’

The fox cub, of course. The ball of fur I had seen curled up in one of Audrey’s animal cages, that was all, nothing more serious than that. Relief flooded warmly through my veins. ‘Oh dear. That’s very sad.’

Jack flung himself as far from me as possible in the confined space. ‘Sad? Is that all you can say?’ He hid his face against Audrey and wept, while she stared coldly into my eyes and stroked his hair as if he were one of her cats. I felt wrong-footed and excluded from the symbiosis of their grief.

I said as gently as I could, ‘It’s time we went home now.’