All three of them were looking at me, Anya with an oddly calm expression which I knew belied the panic underneath. Livi squirmed in my arms and stretched her legs out so her feet pressed into my chest, almost as if she was reminding me she was there. I kissed her downy scalp and saw a look of sorrow wash over Anya’s face. She reached out to touch the baby’s back, then drew her hand in again and reset her expression.

‘How long will this take?’ she said in a rather haughty way to the two policewomen, who exchanged loaded glances.

‘It will take as long as it takes,’ said the one called Jin and Anya nodded, crisply, and spoke to me without meeting my eyes.

‘There is some expressed milk in the freezer,’ she said, her tone entirely neutral.

Finally, I found my voice.

‘On what grounds have you arrested her?’ I asked, realizing, far, far too late, that this question should have come immediately, along with a passionate defence of my wife’s innocence. This thought sent iced water through me. Had I made things worse?

A few minutes later, they were gone. Right on cue, and maybe picking up on both the atmosphere and her mother’s absence, Olivia began to cry.

Time seemed to pass at an agonizingly slow rate that afternoon and evening.

Livi cried on and off for an hour and a half, despite all efforts to placate her. It really felt as though she understood what was going on.

I started off with all the basics: checked the nappy, offered milk. But her nappy was dry and, when I presented her with the carefully prepared bottle of Anya’s milk, she turned her head angrily and bunched her tiny fists in a way that would have been comical if everything hadn’t been so awful. I supposed these weren’t the best circumstances in which to introduce bottle feeding for the first time. Anya had been stock-piling milk in the freezer for when she went back to work, but we hadn’t quite got round to starting Livi on the bottle.

In the end, it was a combination of me running around the room with her and playing ‘Lonely Boy’ by The Black Keys at top volume that stunned her into silence. Every time I went, ‘Whoah-oh-oh-oh …’ she blinked hard, finally, when I was sweating with the effort of it all, breaking into a heart-crushing smile.

I slumped onto the sofa with her then and had another go with the bottle. She moaned and turned her head away until I dribbled some of the now-cool milk onto my hand and let her suck at it. The fierce pull of it gave me some indication of why Anya had found breast feeding so painful at first.