The response was almost instant, even though she’d written at half-one in the morning.

SAMMI THIS IS A POLICEMAN. HE’S CALLED DECTECTIVE INSPECTOR MICHAEL CARRINGTON. IF ITS MARK THEN HE WAS SPYING ON ALL OF US!!!!!!

Sam hadn’t known what to do with that. After half an hour of staring at the screen, she climbed back into bed beside Dale’s snoring bulk and stared at the shadows on the ceiling. Paranoid, she kept muttering to herself. They’d all been paranoid in the squat, and it was something she was sure got worse with age. Look at Clio’s message. The caps lock. The unhinged rush of words. She hadn’t even been sure it was Mark.

It was Mark, wasn’t it.

She threw the covers off, wrapped her fluffy dressing gown back round her bump and walked back into the kitchen. She loaded up the photo and zoomed in as far as she could go.

It was Mark.

She didn’t reply to Clio for two days. She was quiet in the house, tried not to look into Debbie’s beautiful face and have anything at all confirmed, watched her run off to school with that gangling lope she certainly hadn’t got from anyone in Sam’s family and ached for her girl and for the time when it was just them, no one else in the world.

SAMMI WE NEED TO TALK R U STILL IN BRIXTON???

What did it mean, if Mark had been a policeman? She tried to think back thirteen years to the experience of being with him. She remembered the warmth of him in bed and the smell of the sleeping space, the tone of his raised voice in a crowded room. It felt hazy; it could have been something she’d dreamed or a film she’d caught on telly years ago.

She remembered the feeling of watching a man talk, of him not knowing you were watching him, of catching your breath at how beautiful he was. Wanting to see him so badly on the days and sometimes weeks he was away, visiting his mother. She remembered being nineteen and twenty and sick to her stomach with the strength of a feeling. It was one of the hardest, strongest emotions she’d ever had at that point. But the person who’d made her feel that was – what? An actor? A shadow? Not ever really there?

She’d been sitting in front of the same open case file, not moving, for a very long time. The phone on her desk rang. It was Bev at reception. ‘Sam, there’s a woman here to see you. Won’t give her name but says you’re old friends. Red hair.’

Clio was in the café across the road Sam had asked her to go to, hunched over a cup of tea. She looked up and smiled.

‘Hello, pal. Long time, eh?’