As I hurry down to the office, I have to walk right past Munroe House and those doors with the code that I know off by heart. It’s a wound I can’t stop touching. A horror jumping at the corner of my eyes. Nothing in the flat was as it should have been. I saw a home turned inside out; every comforting thing inverted. The body, the bones. I turn my head away, trying not to look when the outer door swings open and I glimpse what looks like a forensic team inside. The figures in white coveralls – is that really what it is now? A crime scene.

And then someone pushes past me and I’m pulled back into the crowd again, letting it carry me on down the road.

I’m grateful that I have a full morning of tasks to occupy my jittering mind. There are half a dozen visits on my to-do list, most of them urgent, all of them important. I force myself to focus. First I have to respond to a call that came in early this morning. It is a young family: a working mum and stay-at-home dad with three children.

‘Thank Christ,’ says the dad when he opens the door to me. ‘We tried to fix it ourselves, but it’s got worse, it’s a proper non-stop dribble now.’ He shows me through to the pipe in the shower, pushing a mildewed curtain aside and telling me not to mind the clutter of bath toys. The leak is bad, in danger of turning into a damaging flood, but it’s a familiar problem for me to solve. We have a plumbing company who always answer the phone. I go out into the hallway of the flat and dial the number. It’s a quick, easy conversation, and then I can tell my anxious tenant that the plumber will be there within the hour, an emergency call-out that we will cover. He’s so grateful and I feel efficient, competent, buoyed right up by being able to help. And for twenty minutes, I’ve not thought about Ms Jones once.

After that I have three inspections to do at the block in Effra Road. The flats here are more modern; the block was only built two years ago and inside the paint is still fresh, not faded and peeling like in Munroe House. As I climb the stairs, I sense a warmth to these flats, something so much friendlier in the atmosphere. But Ms Jones chose that tiny, anonymous flat, tucked away from everything. She could have lived somewhere like this. Wouldn’t she have preferred it?