Jess turns away and stares out the window, seething. We’re approaching Harringay. Finsbury Park is on the left, door after door of seedy hotels that are probably knocking shops on the right. I clock that if we overshoot our destination, we’ll arrive in another few minutes at White Hart Lane. I have an overwhelming urge to go there, or rather back to the magical Tottenham Hotspur team of the early 1980s, sharing with Clare our pride that the two magnificent Argentines, Ardiles and Villa, had chosen our Spurs as their home. And then, from nowhere again, I am overwhelmed by a black sadness that I’ll never see her again.

‘Boss?’

Jess is poring over the A-Z on her lap, checking it against the street signs. ‘Next left. We’re nearly there.’

It wasn’t easy to track down Henryk Deyna, the builder who drove the van that hit Clare. He’s not on the electoral register or listed on the land registry, presumably because he’s renting. But his business is more substantial than I expected. He’s not a bog-standard builder. He installs alarms and calls himself a ‘security consultant’, and he must be doing all right because he has set himself up with a limited company. That was how Jess found him, registered at Companies House as the sole director of HD Security, address given as 49 Hewitt Road, London N4.

Which turns out to be an avenue of small late-Victorian houses just off Green Lanes, where Turkish Cypriot restaurants rub up against IRA-supporting pubs. At number forty-nine, a low brick wall protects a tiny paved front garden, which is strewn with bits of wood and sodden cardboard boxes. As we walk up the path, there is a smell of mouldering food in bins.

Jess rings the bell on the frame of a shabby wooden door whose brown paint is bursting and peeling. Net curtains are drawn across a bay window and there are no lights on inside.

‘Doesn’t look promising.’ The sky is overcast and heading for twilight, but perhaps he’s still at work. ‘Do you want to try again?’

We both stand there, feeling slightly idiotic and wondering what to do, when the neighbour’s door opens. A middle-aged lady emerges.

‘You’re wastin’ your time, darlings,’ she says, in a luxuriant Jamaican accent. ‘The chap who lived there, he’s packed up and left.’

There’s no privacy between the two front paths, just a three-foot high wall. I guess there’s not much privacy between the occupants, either.

‘When was that?’

‘About three weeks ago.’ A few days after he hit Clare with his van. ‘I saw him leaving with two suitcases.’ She looks us up and down, trying to work out whether a man in a blue suit and scuffed brown brogues and his colleague in a tweed skirt and kitten heels are here on official business of some sort. ‘Did he owe you money?’