There was a poster of Joan Armatrading facing the bed. It was a blow up of her 1976 album cover, custom framed and hung with care. It seemed a bit retro for Olivia. I mean, I only knew about Joan because she was one of the few non-jazz LPs that my dad had allowed in his collection, alongside Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and a few very early Jethro Tull’s. I’d played the shit out of it when my dad wasn’t home until I’d got old enough to bootleg my own taste in music.

Next to Joan was a photo-montage sprawled across the metre or so of wall between the poster and the wardrobe door. Most of the pictures were inkjet hardcopies on standard gauge printing paper and pasted to the wall with Evo-Stik but some had obviously been cut from magazines. Fashion magazines, judging by the glossy quality of the paper – I recognised Alek Wek, Azealia Banks and a smattering of white pop stars and actors. The other photos were phone snaps – mostly selfies – Olivia at parties, clubs and school. Olivia out and about in London.

I got out my phone and took reference pictures of all the people featured in the snaps and made a rough note of how many times they appeared. One white girl was the out and out favourite – wide set blue eyes, a mass of curly black hair that either flopped untidily over her face or was pulled back into a variety of pigtails, bunches and, in one instance, elaborately piled up on her head. The latter saw her and Olivia posing in formal dresses outside somewhere gilt-edged and posh looking – they had their arms comfortably wrapped around each other’s waists and were grinning mischievously at the camera. Best Friends Forever, I decided. None of the other boys and girls turned up with anything like the same frequency and all, with the exception of one snap of her brother and another of her mother, were white.