‘We got together,’ he says, his voice a little unsteady, ‘when she was in her second year. She would have been – what – twenty then? I was twenty-two. She was my first … proper girlfriend.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again. ‘She must have really meant so much to you.’

He gives a small nod. ‘She did.’

‘Can I … can I ask how you met?’

‘Oh …’ Alastair smiles, faintly. ‘In a coffee shop. She was at the till and twenty pence short for her hot chocolate. I lent her the change. We started chatting … and that was that. We saw each other all the time from then on. We were together eleven months in the end.’

‘You were so close. And eleven months … You know, I’m glad. I’m glad she had someone who cared about her like that.’ My voice sounds waterlogged, thick to my ears. ‘And … her friends? Did you meet them, the other people in her life?’

‘I don’t … I mean, we … hung out in different groups. And then once we got together, she seemed to want to spend all her time with me. At my place.’ He gives me a shaky smile. ‘I didn’t mind that.’ He rubs the palm of his hand across his eyes. ‘I liked it. We’d spend all the time we could together. We talked … we talked all the time about the future. We had all these plans. She’d describe where we would live when she’d graduated and we’d saved enough money, all these different places we would travel to. She loved talking like that. She had this way of making everything feel so real.’

I swallow, a scrape of dryness passing down my throat. I can see the bedsit again, that shrunken body on the sofa. I don’t know if I’ll ever stop seeing that form.

‘But it never happened like that? And afterwards, you never kept in touch?’

I realize as soon as the words have come out that they sound like a horrible accusation. Alastair’s expression is so pained and hollow and I have spoken so clumsily. ‘I’m sorry,’ I say quickly. ‘I didn’t mean it that way.’ I am suddenly caught by the rushing shame of what I’m doing. Coming here, asking questions, hurting this man who has done nothing wrong.

‘I’m sorry,’ I repeat, ‘I shouldn’t have come here, I’m upsetting you, it’s awful of me, I’m sorry.’

What am I doing, messing about in other people’s lives? I don’t have the right, how could I have thought that I did? I push my chair back, half get up.

But Alastair reaches across the table. ‘Please don’t go,’ he says. ‘You can’t come here with news like this and not give me any chance to talk about it. I’m not in touch with anyone else who knew her and right now I’m full of memories and questions, and who am I going to go home and talk to?’