‘I was told to stay inside,’ she says. ‘They didn’t even send anyone. So I press charges against him? He’s only going to get more angry. And it’s not like he’ll be locked away forever.’

Realistically he would probably only get community service. I don’t tell her this.

‘Where do you live?’ I ask just as someone, presumably the barman, cuts the music. My voice booms in the sudden silence.

She glances up. For a moment my surroundings blur away and I experience an internal, expansive whirl I’ve not felt for a long time. I wonder if she felt it too. I guess I’m hoping she did, though I’m not sure I can see any sign of it.

‘On Nassaukade,’ she says. ‘By the park?’

I take the beer mat off her, borrow a pen from the uniform now talking to the manager, who is still wringing his hands. If he carries on like that he’s not going to have any skin left. I write on the mat, along one of the straighter tentacles.

‘You see him again? Call me.’

I tap the mat, turn and walk out. Not a bad exit if I say so myself. For some reason I hope Sabine was impressed. I get that giddy little whirl again.

It’s dark now, colourful lights streak across the canal’s black surface, and I stand for a moment breathing in the city I know so well. The city that made me.

And then tried its best to break me.

The earlier warmth left with the sun. A shudder trembles my spine.

I pull the hood over my head with my good arm and slip off into the neon night.

Just before I reach Bloemgracht, the canal where my houseboat is moored, I pass a newsagent’s board screaming the headline ‘No leads in Marianne Kleine case’. Inside I pick up a copy of De Telegraaf and take it to the counter.

‘Anything else?’ The bored guy’s question brings me back to myself. What am I doing?

‘Uhhh … no. Actually I don’t need this either.’

A bell tinkles as I open the door and leave. I’m shaken, but also pleased I didn’t fall back into the trap. These days I have to celebrate the small victories. I turn off Prinsengracht and my houseboat swings into view. I stop for a moment and admire it.

In its day it hauled freight, coal I’m guessing, until a fire in the mid-sixties took out a large part of the upper deck. Headed for the scrapheap, or whatever the marine equivalent is, someone snapped it up at the last minute and repurposed it as a houseboat. They rebuilt the deck and reconfigured the inside into liveable space. I bought it eleven years ago, just when my career in the police was really taking off and it seemed like the future had open arms.