Either side of the mantelpiece were two sagging armchairs covered in a brown moquette. His table was heavy and plain. Utility, no doubt. Solid. Value for money. Too clumsy, her father had said. Where is the flair? He had got rid of theirs years ago, bought a new G-plan dining set. The floor was covered in brown linoleum, and in front of the fire was a black semicircle with a long, shaggy pile.

‘I didn’t know you…’ She was about to say had a dog before she realised it was a hearthrug. What an idiot.

‘I thought it was one of those black retrievers,’ she said. She pulled a face, silly me, looking either side of the mantelpiece, at the shelves in the alcoves stacked with books, paperbacks, mainly, though she could see some hardbacks on the top shelves, Schiller and Goethe, Brecht and Mann written on the spines, and a fat Oxford German Dictionary.

‘You’re taking it in,’ he said. ‘Does it meet with your approval?’

‘This doesn’t look too bad,’ she said. ‘I was expecting worse when you said it was a battlefield.’ Could she ask him about the clock?

‘It wasn’t too bad in here,’ he said. ‘Though the bulb’s gone in the reading lamp, which is a nuisance. Come through.’

He opened the door to the kitchen. There were blood smears across the window and down the walls, on the table and the cupboard doors, thin rusty blood, the kind you get from an insect or a reptile. She shut her eyes for a moment, squeezing out the memory of blood along the pavement, splattered on walls. Of Otto, pale against the cobbled street.

He’d called it a battle zone, but he’d obviously never seen one. Betty knew about blood, knew how to steel herself against it. ‘Do you have a bucket? Disinfectant?’

‘I think so,’ he said. ‘My charlady…’ He bent down to the space below the sink and pulled out a small can of Jeyes from the back.

‘Rubber gloves?’ Betty said. ‘This stuff burns like mad. Stinks like hell.’

John rummaged some more, produced gloves, a floor cloth and a bucket.

‘Come on, I’ll do it,’ he said. ‘I can’t let you clean up for me. Why don’t you put the kettle on?’

‘I thought you were squeamish,’ she said.

‘Well, it doesn’t look so dreadful now. It was the shock, I think.’