I was so close to being out, turning my back on the police, the person it’d made me become. But I got caught up in it again, giving in to that part of me that can’t let go, the part of me which has to know, has to find out who killed Lucie Muller and Marianne Kleine, who it was who’d stripped them naked, slit their throats and let them bleed out like beasts in an abattoir.

And now I’ve been punished for it. Punished for being who I am. The darkness within. My mouth’s dry.

I find the note in the kitchen, held down with a set of keys. Her handwriting’s bold, fluid, and reminds me of old parchments and quill pens. It tells me she’s had to go to work but that I can stay as long as I like. There’s not much else around. Sabine had said she was only here temporarily whilst she looked for somewhere more permanent; her stuff is all in storage. I’d found a charger plugged in next to the toaster, so I drift around the place aimlessly whilst I wait for my phone to charge, and try not to think of what I’ve lost. I flick the radio on, voices arguing about the acid attack, which a fundamentalist group has now claimed responsibility for. Click. Silence. Which gets drowned out by the noise inside my head. I don’t think I can cope with it right now.

I wander around looking for something to distract myself with. In the living area, a small space with little more than a TV on the wall, I move a cardboard box off the sofa and a photo falls out. In it Sabine’s sitting on a stone wall somewhere out in the countryside, her hair flapping about in the wind. I wonder who took the photo. Was it her ex, Tom? The one who’d stabbed me in the arm and shoved me down the steps?

Despite the transience of the place, it still seems like hers, and it starts to feel like an intrusion, more intimate an act than sleeping with her. I force down a coffee laced with sugar, and some sliced cheese I find in the fridge, which I roll up like a cigar before biting off the end. It tastes old. I spit it out and chuck the rest. Next I try to compose a note to Sabine, but after several false starts scrunch it up into a ball I put in my pocket. There’s a first-aid kit under the bathroom sink. I clean off the wound and use a plaster which is only just big enough. I drop the old dressing into the bin. It lands face down, white fabric with a large circle of blood dried in the middle.