The rich ones had big, modish clocks with white faces and black hands, and large gilt mirrors on the walls that reflected matching sofas and elegant, etiolated house plants. The rest of the houses, on the other hand, had posters tacked up without a frame, IKEA shelving units and an assortment of furniture acquired for free online (though only if you’d gone and collected it). Many of these intended living rooms had been repurposed as bedrooms, like Ellen’s. New Cross was a hotchpotch of people living in close proximity, near to both Goldsmiths and Camberwell School of Art, which meant a mixture of students and professors often living on the same street. There were also the families priced out of more expensive homes in Herne Hill or Dulwich – and people in their twenties, who hadn’t yet realized they’d been priced out of the property market altogether, and dreamed pointlessly of one day buying one of these homes.

Alexa put her key in their blue door and was, she realized, slightly relieved to find it still double locked. She was home alone. The door swung open with a judder. She flicked the light switch and picked the post off the doormat – a shuffle through the pile confirming it was all addressed to previous tenants, despite the fact they’d been there for three years now – then slung her handbag over the knob on the end of the banister. Ellen’s bedroom was to the left of the front door, and beyond the staircase that led up to the first floor was their kitchen, a big room with a large, wobbly table that was the house’s only communal space.

Padding into the kitchen now, she opened the door to her food cupboard and – after surveying the sad contents – swiftly closed it again. She added the former tenants’ letters to a large, deep bowl that sat at the end of the long kitchen table and contained, among other treasures, a transparent purple lighter, a blister pack of ibuprofen (empty), a takeaway menu for a local kebab shop, a USB cable and about €6 in coins. She pulled out a chair, wincing as she scraped the legs across the kitchen floor, and sat down. She took a deep breath.