What did he want or expect, or need? Were they going to install him in the spare room of an off-plan flat that didn’t exist yet, and never let him go? The woman would say, ‘Listen. You’re not going anywhere until we get to the bottom of this little problem of yours. We have room! We have that little ensuite guest room, Michael.’

She would be so unbearably kind, and he – the husband – would be distant but wise. His respect for and love of all human life had been forged in the army, where he’d probably commanded troops as a brigadier or colonel. He’d seen his share of bloodletting, of course. He’d seen his own men blown to pieces by the IRA. Not as bad as the First World War, but you still had bodies cut to ribbons, spread around the tracks with shoes in the grass… and the invoices. Oh, the invoices: they had piled up only because he hadn’t been able to deal with them, or his mother. He hadn’t been able to enter the details onto the spreadsheets. He had hit an obstacle, and could not concentrate properly, and he had been getting headaches because Elizabeth was so long gone as to be one of those old legends you told yourself round the campfire like a sad, drunk Red Indian reliving the good old days when the buffalo roamed.

The house in which they had never lived together was so, so dark. Every time he typed numbers into the appropriate box, it seemed it was the wrong box. The numbers were sometimes right and sometimes wrong, and it seemed to take such a long time to enter one single invoice, particularly as he became ridiculously, obsessively correct. He would have to have breaks – and that meant trips to the kitchen area, where they had the coffee machine and the fridge. It meant time away from his desk, but nobody ever challenged him because nobody was actually waiting for him to complete a task: the invoices were loaded onto spreadsheets and the finance department dealt with them as and when they came in.

His desk was his sanctuary.