I am glad that he has come straight out with her name. Labelled the point of us meeting again like this. I lower my menu and make myself look directly across at him. I wonder if he might be as nervous and awkward as me. There’s no real template for what we’re doing, bonding only through a woman who died.

I clear my throat. It takes a few goes. It really feels as if I have something stuck in there. ‘I got a phone call the other day. There’s going to be an inquest. I need to submit information for a statement. But I’m still trying … to piece it all together.’

Alastair lets out a breath. ‘I stopped by … Munroe House before coming here,’ he says. ‘That’s the place, isn’t it? Where she was living. Where she … died.’

The name of the block makes me flinch. ‘How did you know where it was?’

He looks back at me. ‘I looked it up. Google Maps.’

I shake my head. ‘Of course. Yes. She had the bedsit there, on the ground floor.’ I get a flash of it: that cramped space under the stairway; the radio playing; the lifting of the letter flap.

‘Did you think of anything else?’ he asks me. ‘After we spoke? Have you found out anything else that you should tell me?’

‘Only that … through this, um, work database, I managed to trace her parents’ address.’

‘Their address?’ An expression I can’t read slides across his face.

‘Yes. And then I looked their house up online. But it isn’t there now. It’s been torn down.’

‘What? You saw that?’

‘On Google Street View.’

He is staring at me. I haven’t told Alastair about the message in my email inbox. And now I can’t help testing him, checking.

‘Maybe I shouldn’t be looking into all this. Maybe there are people who think it isn’t my place. Maybe I shouldn’t be getting involved after all …’

I watch him, carefully, for his reaction. Alastair lays his menu to one side and rests his wrists on the edge of the table. For a second I worry about him getting splinters, but when I feel with my own fingers, I can tell the edge of the wooden table is quite smooth.

He shakes his head. ‘Don’t say that. I’m glad you came and found me. We can’t stop now, not after everything you’ve told me. I keep remembering all sorts of things. Nothing that would help us though. Just … how happy she seemed.’

How happy.

‘Her parents though. There was an issue there, wasn’t there? They were … estranged in some way? The police, they couldn’t reach … and then at the funeral. Alastair, there was no one there.’