A funeral. How could I not have even thought about that? Of course there will need to be a funeral for her. But if no one had missed her in all this time, and no one even knew she had died, then who on earth would be there to attend?

Images flash in front of me. The table set for guests who never came. The broken figure on the couch. And an email that clearly I have somehow imagined.

‘… I mean, if it was my daughter, or whatever,’ PC Delliers is saying, ‘Jesus, I’d want to be there, I’d want to know everything.’

She’s right, of course. Any parent would, surely, no matter what had gone before. Wouldn’t they? Even if there’d been a falling out, a rift? But I can’t help the thought flashing through my mind: Would mine?

‘I have to go now,’ PC Delliers is saying. ‘Thank you anyway for your help.’

And before I can say anything else, she hangs up.

What happens next is that the police release a statement to the press. I hear it at home that evening, on the local BBC Radio London news. Charlie is in the bath down the hallway; I can hear him splashing. I keep the volume of the radio low.

The statement is very brief. Police are appealing for information, the newsreader says, about an incident that occurred at flat sixteen, Munroe House, Brixton. Anyone who knows the occupant or has a connection with this address should contact … and then there’s a phone number, and then that’s all.

They don’t even release her name.

I want to rewind and replay it, but it’s the radio and the news just moves on to other things and it’s gone. On my mobile, after I’ve put Charlie to bed, I scan the online news sites for more information, but there’s nothing else I can find. Waves of exhaustion roll through me, but if I go to bed, I’m not sure I’ll sleep. I sit for a long while in our cold kitchen, questions chasing themselves round my mind, and between them nothing but white space, blank gaps. The kind of blankness my mind can’t stand, the kind of not-knowing that could conceal anything.

At ten o’clock, I listen in again to the radio news, hoping this time to glean some new detail. Any tiny crumb I can learn about what happened.

But on this bulletin, they don’t mention the story at all.

For the next few days, I’m left in limbo. With no next of kin, there’s nothing I can do. I try to switch off from it, concentrate on my own life. Reminding myself not to get involved.