‘Yes! I had to wait ages at the station. They took my stuff away and searched me and I got my fingerprints taken.’ Erica holds her fingers towards him, making wriggling stars of her hands, as though they are proof, although it was done on a screen, not with ink, so there’s no trace. ‘And my DNA. I asked if that was standard and they said it was. Then I rang a solicitor they gave me the number for, and she said she didn’t need to come in and the police wouldn’t do anything. Then I sat in an interview room for a bit.’

‘Wow.’ It’s not an admiring ‘wow’, but she pretends not to notice. She smiles. He doesn’t smile. His face is a sky of hurt with a brow of coming thunder.

‘Erica, I was worried before you came back. I’m even more worried now.’

And the bravado rushes out of her as suddenly as it rushed in. ‘I was scared.’ And she was, just for a few minutes, scared that being in the police station would stop being an adventure, a misunderstanding, a case of pissing off someone who didn’t, in that moment, need to be pissed off, and had the power to show it. She’d thought about miscarriages of justice, and whether she had to declare this on job applications. Wondered about the women who didn’t have the luxury of all the things that protected her, however much she didn’t want to believe that they did: money, skin colour, education.

Marcus half-smiles. ‘I would have been too,’ he says, ‘why didn’t you phone me? Tom and I would have broken you out.’

‘A woman came to talk to me, asked me what my involvement was, and I told her, and then she let me go.’

Marcus lays Tom on the sofa next to him and barricades him in place with a cushion. Erica scoots along the sofa to make room, crosses her legs. She can smell the fustiness of her sweated-in socks.

‘And what did Veronica do?’ he asks. ‘While all this was going on?’

‘She took my photograph. What else was she going to do?’

‘So it was a good day, huh?’