The silence is awful. It makes it so much worse, because now there is no escape from the awful sense of emptiness in the flat, and the realization that I am never going to get that sight out of my head, that crumpled, shrunken shape on the sofa, because no matter how much I try to tell myself I don’t know what it is, I do, I do.

The female police officer turns and holds her arms out like a cordon. ‘All right, everyone out,’ she says. ‘We need to treat this as a crime scene.’

Chapter 3

The moments just after those words go blank. They become white squares in which I have no sense of what is happening around me. What I saw has knocked me right out of myself. It feels like something out of a horror movie, but this is real. My tenant should be here, walking, talking. Instead on the couch there is a body, but a body that is so worn away: hair, bones, teeth, all that’s left of a person.

I find myself back at the bottom of the stairwell, my breath coming in heaves and gasps, gripping Ms Jones’s file against my chest like a shield. Layers and layers of my neat, precise paperwork clipped inside, as though any of that can help me now.

The next piece of time is jumbled. I’m aware of the female police officer radioing someone, and then other officers arriving. One of them draws me aside, stylus poised above an electronic notebook, asking for my name and address, and my connection to this flat, this tenant, and where they can reach me, checking that I’ll be in the office all day, can they come and find me and take my full statement there?

I can’t avoid it now. I will have to go back to the office and tell Abayomi everything.

When they have my details, they let me go. As I walk back up the street towards our office, I feel like a ghost. The wind seems to blow right through me and my whole body feels hollow. It’s hard to place one foot before the other and keep walking in a straight line. Those shrunken remains on the couch, that form that was supposed to be a person, how can I unsee that, and what happened, what happened?

In the office, my desk looks exactly as I left it, as though nothing has changed at all and the world hasn’t just turned upside down. Emma isn’t back yet, but there’s a message on my personal phone that still lies face down on the desk where I left it. Feeling as though I am standing outside my own body, I swipe to open it. Please don’t worry about what happened this morning. Charlie has settled in fine and is having a good day. If you wish to discuss anything further, please feel free to call.