I wondered about Sabine’s beach bar girlfriend. What had happened to being a diving instructor in the Caymans? I thought of an idea I’d had more recently, perhaps not an idea so much as a dare, to get in touch with her. Of the wasted hours I’d spent swinging indecisively between whether to or not, thinking about what I’d say to her—when all the while she’d been dead. Lying dead, with nobody even aware of it, in a house in Peckham.

Despite having been teetotal for years, when I got home I cracked open a bottle of whiskey. Then I trawled the internet again. There was no additional news on Sabine’s death, nor anything regarding the Cayman Islands. Though I did find a photograph of her in a black swimsuit, hair streaming, bare-faced, pulling herself out of a lido.

She looked like a little girl; I desperately wanted to hug her. Remembering her lie about her brother, I felt stupid for trying to be like her. I thought of her being a hoarder, of her not wanting me to visit her place, of the fear it must have evoked in her. More than ever, I wanted to befriend her again, to do better by her. Of course she’d made birthday cards for people at work. That was what she was like. I missed her in a way I’d never allowed myself to before. She looked so alive.

Folding my arms on the desk, I buried my head in them.

When gray daylight woke me I remembered why I’d stopped overdoing it with the booze. Not the headache or the nausea but the anxiety. Huge, as if I’d accidentally killed someone. I plugged the charger into my phone. A client wanted a video conference at eleven about an art catalogue. There was also a missed call from a number I didn’t recognize. The caller had left a voicemail. “Meggie, this is Earl from back in the day. Found you through your translation site. Don’t know if you’ve heard, and sorry to break the news if not, but SJ died. There’s a funeral tomorrow. Her bro from Japan asked me to tell those she used to work with. I’ll text the address. Hope you can be there.”

45

If Sabine had been taller, about forty, and tanned berry-brown, if Sabine had been male with brown-black eyes and no squint—then she might have looked something like the man who stood alone in the front row of the crematorium.