I hit the stainless-steel wall in frustration and then something occurs to me. I pull open the other drawers in a frenzy and – oh God – there he is. I actually laugh out loud. I just got the wrong drawer.

A wave of shame washes over me because I am laughing again and quite clearly a man is dead. Stuart’s eyes are open and glassy. I swallow down another wave of nausea. I brush my hand over his face to close his eyelids like I’ve seen them do in films, reassuring myself that I am already wearing gloves but then I think about what I’ve got to do next and realize that it’s not going to matter whether I’m wearing gloves or not. No one is going to be able to take fingerprints or any other evidence from Stuart once he’s been through where I’m going to put him. This time vomit actually rises into my mouth but I swallow it back – I cannot throw up in here. Not now.

I need to be quick. I pull Stuart out of the drawer and he falls awkwardly onto the ground. He is not a large man but he seems to weigh a ton. The phrase ‘dead weight’ springs into my mind and I see now what it means.

I push the thought away. This is not the time to be thinking about stuff like that, for fuck’s sake. Concentrate. I take the sheets out of the base of the trolley – I only put a couple in before I brought it out from the store cupboard – and drag Stuart’s torso in. I then gather up his arms and legs, bending and twisting him until he’s all in. It’s all so undignified. Poor Stuart. He doesn’t deserve any of this. And yet, I did this to him. It’s my fault.

The realization hits me once again that I have murdered this man and I wonder whether I should give myself up. I’m not sure I can live with this. I can go to Leo now, tell him that Stuart and I had a fight, maybe because he said something bad about Lola, maybe that he’d had sex with her (he probably has, I don’t know) and then treated her badly or something and that I accidentally killed him during our fight. That kind of thing happens, doesn’t it? Maybe I could confess to killing Stuart without needing to involve Lola at all. It would be easy enough to give myself a few fake injuries here and now. I’m not afraid of pain.

No one would need to know that Lola is still alive – I can stick to the story I told Stuart about me wearing her clothes. That would work, wouldn’t it?