They went into the kitchen, found the supply of cat food and Jamie forked some of the meat onto a plastic dish. Lennon ate away happily.

‘So,’ Jamie said. ‘Have you had a good enough nose around?’

‘Yes thanks.’ She looked at the floor. ‘Actually, while we’re up here, I want to try something. I want to see how sound carries between these flats. We hardly ever hear Mary moving around, do we? You go downstairs into our flat and I’ll run around a bit.’

‘OK.’

He went downstairs and stood in the living room, knowing that Kirsty was standing right above him. It was silent in the flat, and he cocked an ear to the ceiling. He heard a light padding sound; he thought he could hear someone talking, but very faintly. He went back upstairs.

‘So what could you hear?’ Kirsty asked.

‘Hardly anything. Very light footsteps, some muffled talking – but I had to really listen hard. What were you doing?’

‘I was running up and down the room. I jumped a couple of times, like this.’ She jumped and landed heavily. ‘And I put the TV on and turned it up loud. Like this.’ She flicked the TV on and boosted the volume. ‘Are you saying you couldn’t hear that?’

‘Hardly.’

‘It doesn’t make sense. It can’t be that the floorboards in our flat are extra thin. Lucy and Chris must have really sensitive hearing.’

‘Yeah. Like dogs.’

Kirsty was right. It didn’t make sense.

Chapter Eleven

Eleven

Jamie couldn’t stand the smell of hospitals. The cloying stink of disinfectant; the vapour trails of anguish and pain and disease. He was glad that Kirsty showered and changed when she got home from work – he would hate it if that smell clung to her all evening instead of the clean, warm natural smells of her body. He sometimes felt that he had a more finely-tuned sense of smell than most people – a sensitivity that made it impossible for him to stay in certain malodorous places. When he drove past a crematorium, he could smell ashes and fumes. Public toilets contained many horrors. The stink of body odour on the Tube made him want to be sick. But the worst smell of all was the smell of hospitals.