‘Sorry,’ he said. ‘I didn’t mean to freak you out. One of your neighbours let me in.’

‘Sab, you . . .’ Harri trailed off and took a couple of deep breaths to settle her heart.

‘What’s got you so jumpy?’

‘This case,’ she said, walking to the lift.

‘So it’s a case now?’ Sabih pressed the call button.

‘Yes. The deaths of David and Elizabeth Asha.’

‘I knew you were up to something,’ Sabih replied. ‘I’m guessing your former beau, Benjamin Elmys, is the suspect.’

‘It’s too early to say whether he’s a suspect, or even if there’s been a crime. I could be chasing nothing,’ Harri replied. ‘But it feels like there’s something there.’

She didn’t even experience the slightest glimmer of betrayal when she took the most recent poem from her pocket and handed it to Sabih. Her old partner started reading as the lift opened. He followed her absently into the car, and the doors slid shut behind him.

‘ “I long to return to that so real place, where you took your hand in mine,” ’ he read, leaning against the doors. ‘How is that even possible? “You took your hand in mine”.’

Harri flushed, suddenly feeling exposed by having shared something that had clearly been intended to be private. She understood what it meant.

‘I think it’s about not having a choice,’ she replied. ‘But having a choice at the same time.’

‘OK. Whatever,’ Sabih scoffed. ‘ “Your fingers traced along my arm, drawing maps of worlds to come”.’

Sabih looked from Harri to the note and back again, like a West End tourist who’d been handed a flyer for a religious cult, and for a moment his mouth opened and closed wordlessly. Harri hated him in that instant. Ben Elmys might be strange, but she’d felt a depth to his words that drained away when Sabih spoke them. They sounded meaningless and tacky. She regretted giving him the poem because he was robbing her of something special and diminishing the man she loved. Used to love, she corrected herself, but she wasn’t sure that was true. She wasn’t over Ben. He had seemed possessed of a soul unlike anyone else she’d ever met. He might not be perfect, but she had thought he was perfect for her. Now, in this tiny lift, Sabih made him sound like a moody teenage poet who’d listened to too much Bon Iver.

The clunk and rumble of the elevator mechanism announced they had arrived, and the doors opened.

‘I think I should arrest him for crimes against poetry,’ Sabih said as they stepped out.

Harri was about to protest, but caught herself. You’re developing some sort of weird Stockholm syndrome, she told herself. He rejected you. You owe him nothing. Any love you might have felt for him has to be in the past, or you’ll never move on.

‘I think it’s good,’ she replied, taking the poem. She couldn’t help herself. She felt she needed to defend Ben.