The reporter who usually attended North London Crown Court for the Monday sessions had gone down with ’flu, and Jepson had volunteered to take his place. He’d been hoping for spivs or fraudsters but had been landed with an interminable case based on the illegally high percentage of sugar that a Palmer’s Green confectioner had been using in his fruitcakes (‘The cook’s hand may have shaken when putting in the sugar,’ said Mr Harry Ricketts, defending …’). By lunch-time, he was having to pinch his arm in order to stay awake.

Brookes from the Evening Standard was off to Islington to review a pantomime (‘Goldi-fucking-locks and the three moth-eaten fur coats from the director’s gran’s wardrobe’) and the youngster from the Muswell Hill Advertiser was so new and conscientious that she was spending the entire lunch hour transcribing her notes, so Jepson sat alone in the window seat of a cold little restaurant, its floor footprinted with melting slush, and ate stewed oxtail (not a patch on Noel’s) while reading a rather racy new novel about air-raid wardens, borrowed from the arts desk.

He was waiting for the bill when he noticed his landlady on the opposite pavement, peering into the fogged-up window of a café. She stepped back, looked up at the street name and then at the name of the café, before once again edging up to the glass. The whole set of her shoulders signalled uncertainty. When she half turned, he lifted a hand, but her eyes scraped past him, unseeing. He had not, in any case, had anything approaching a conversation with her since their exchange about Corporal O’Mahoney three days before. You’re an idiot, he thought to himself, for about the fiftieth time. There’d been absolutely no need to actually tell Mrs Overs what had seemed fairly obvious to him – attuned as he was from decades of court-reporting – even before he’d spotted O’Mahoney just after New Year, exiting the woods at the top of the Heath a step or two ahead of a flushed-looking airman; she’d clearly had the time of her life with the corporal, had laughed her head off and dropped ten years and skipped around like a schoolgirl, and where was the harm in that? – it had been finite; she wasn’t going to end up pregnant in the middle of Nebraska, with coyotes tugging at her washing, like half the girls in Norfolk. And God knows there’d been no malice in the man: he’d been bonhomie personified, had shaken up the house like a snow-globe and made Jepson feel like the dreary bore that Della had always labelled him.

He watched Mrs Overs touch the handle of the café door as if there were a chance it was electrified, and then spring aside as the door opened, emitting an elderly man, and a gout of steam. She caught it before it closed again, and went inside, and Jepson, drawn by curiosity, paid his bill and crossed the street.

From the pavement, he could see her seated at a table against the side wall, her posture rigid, her hands clasped, her eyes fixed on the entrance. It took him a moment to define her expression, and when he realized, with a jolt, that it was fear, he was through the café door before he could think about it.