I couldn’t face cooking and, anyway, I felt disinclined to be the perfect house husband today. I felt like I had done enough.

So I opened a new bottle of wine and took a plate of toast and Marmite through to the sitting room, where I sat in the light from the telly and watched old episodes of Friends. I had seen them all before, many times, but the sugary antics in Central Perk seemed to soothe me and I let myself become numb and without thoughts.

When Anya came in, I was almost dozing. She hesitated at the doorway and I gazed through half-shut lids at her shape there, before forcing my eyes open and sitting upright.

‘You alright?’ she said. ‘What’s going on?’

Groaning at the ache in my neck, I stretched and then rubbed my face.

‘Shall I put the lights on?’ she said and I could hear the exhaustion in her voice.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Come sit over here.’

She laughed, surprising me with the bright harshness of the sound in the gloomy room. ‘You’re being weird, Ell. What’s going on? Has someone died?’

For some reason, this felt like precisely the wrong thing to say.

‘Well, Michael Copeland died,’ I said.

She turned to leave the room.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘come back. I want to talk.’

Anya hesitated for a moment and then came into the room. She sat down on the chair near the door; as far from me as she could. I had the horrible sensation then that she was a little afraid of me.

‘I went to Cambridge today..’

The effect was akin to an electric jolt, it seemed. Her whole body seemed to jerk and then she was hunched forward, hands around her knees, staring at me intently.

‘Why did you go there?’ she said, very carefully.

Her eyes looked large and scared in her pale face and she was wringing her hands together.

When did I start mistrusting her like this?

‘I went to see Michael Copeland’s mother,’ I said and her intake of breath was sharp.

‘Ell,’ she said quickly, ‘what the fuck were you thinking? What on earth for?’

I rubbed my hands across my face and let out a big sigh.

‘She wrote to you,’ I said and I picked up the letter that was next to me on the sofa. I threw it over to Anya, who fumbled and dropped it onto the rug, then scrambled to pick it up. She normally had brilliant hand–eye coordination and this sign of nerves added to my feeling of discomfort that I was being cruel.

I was just sick of being left outside, that was all.

She reached over and snapped on one of the lamps before opening the envelope and retrieving the letter.

‘You might like the dark, but I think lighting is important to an interrogation, don’t you?’ she said tightly.

I didn’t reply.