Desperately I tried to picture the rough form. I wanted to turn the fading edges into clean lines and the greys into colours, but I couldn’t. It remained a ragged silhouette. I shook my head. ‘I’m sorry, it’s too blurred.’

‘You have to try.’

And so I tried again, seeing the shifting water reflected in the glass. Waves of light ran across its surface and I tried to focus on them, telling myself that if I remembered, it would mean an end to this terrible day and Nick and I could go home. He would loathe me for my unfounded suspicions about him, but we could get through it and pick up the pieces. Yet, no matter how hard I reached for the memory, feeling my head pulse with the effort, it stayed locked away from me as surely as if it had never formed. ‘I can’t,’ I whispered.

‘Try.’

‘I can’t, I just can’t!’ There was silence. I looked at the other man in the room. He said nothing.

The policeman rolled his pen in his fingers thoughtfully. Then he went back to asking me more questions and I answered them. Questions about my family and how long I had been in London, that sort of thing. From time to time he would softly return to the image in the mirror but what remained of the memory seemed to crumble and become less real every time.

He wrote everything down in his notebook and I had to sign each page to say it was a true statement of the facts. My fingers could barely hold the pen as I did so – the shock still, I supposed. I might be required to attend the station to make another statement soon, he told me. ‘What happened to her?’ I asked, with my eyes cast down. ‘To Lorelei.’

He cleared his throat. ‘That’s what we’re going to find out.’

And then, finally, the other man spoke. ‘I think that will be all,’ he said. His voice was calm and controlled.

At first I presumed he was speaking to me. But the policeman replied, ‘Is that so?’ I could tell by his face that he was beaten, though, and I got the sense that there was something going on that I couldn’t see.

‘Thank you, Detective Sergeant. May I have your notes, please? They will go in our files.’ And that’s when I realized who he was. I had thought he must be a senior plain-clothes policeman, but I was wrong, of course.

The old police officer paused briefly to critically appraise him, but he didn’t challenge him before ripping the pages out of his notebook, handing them over and walking out.