‘So who do I need to be talking to?’

‘Give me your number. I’ll get someone to call you back. Someone who can help.’

I give him my mobile and hang up. I’ll give it an hour. In the meantime I turn to plan B, dialling the AMC’s switchboard. It’s working hours so I know Nellie will have her mobile phone turned off. It takes me a few minutes but I’m finally connected to Dr Nellie de Vries’ line. She only started her clinic at the AMC after the trial took place, but at least she might be able to point me in the right direction.

I’m only expecting her answer machine, so it’s a surprise when her voice comes on the line. We spend a few minutes talking, though I neglect to tell her about my houseboat. It would take too long, and frankly I want to forget about it for a bit. Using work to avoid my personal troubles? Well, yeah. Me and the rest of the world. I explain what I’m after and she promises to look into it. She does mention that there’s unlikely to be much, as the trials are highly guarded. The pharmaceutical companies don’t want anyone to know what they’re up to, so it’s likely that any AMC staff involved didn’t know much, if anything. I hang up and turn back to the papers, trying to see if there’s anything I’ve missed and I’m caught up in it all until the thought of Kush burning to death hits me out of nowhere.

I burst into tears.

Ash lifts lazily into the air each time I put a foot down. I breathe in the residue of my incinerated life. Right now I could be inhaling part of the washing machine, the kitchen table, a CD of Bach’s ‘Magnificat’, hydrocarbons from any number of objects I’d owned or obscure parts of the boat’s construction seeping into my lungs, and from there travelling throughout my body until they cross the blood–brain barrier doing who knows what damage. Or Kush. Kush could now be there, inside my head. I feel a deep wave of nausea.

Once it’s passed I tune in to the fire investigator, a tall man with a neat grey moustache whose hands were freezing cold when we’d shaken earlier. Currently he’s crouched down where I calculate my sofa would have been. The whole top deck is gone, so the space which was below deck is now open to the sky. The hull, being made of some kind of metal, has stayed mostly intact, enough to keep it afloat at any rate.

‘It was the electrics,’ I tell him. ‘They’d just been fixed but something went wrong with one of the circuits yesterday.’

‘Where was the consumer unit?’