‘Go home, get some kip,’ said Larwood, after she’d retraced her steps to the Incident Post to report the body, but when at last she was sitting, wrapped in a blanket in front of her two-bar fire, the black-and-white cat with its face in a saucer of pilchards (it had followed her the whole way to her front door), an oblong of unexpected sunlight on the wall behind, she no longer felt tired – or rather, she had moved beyond sleepiness into a state in which the events of the day were ineluctably unscrolling in her head, each moment as vivid as the next, her inner eye darting between Basset’s face and the circling starlings, the dense khaki of the lentil soup from the WVS van, the shift-worker who’d shouted at her for waking him when she’d knocked on his shattered front door, the raw meat of bodies, a budgerigar pinging its bell in a crumpled cage, the lady who’d sung ‘Oh, Mr Porter’ from the cupboard under her stairs to guide the diggers towards her, a living child holding the hand of her dead sister, a broken mirror in a hill of rubble, flashing like an Aldis lamp at every touch of a torch-beam.

She was roused from her thoughts by an odd noise from beneath the bed – a series of rustles and snaps – and she leaned over and lifted the counterpane. The cat looked back at her. It was lying on its side, its claws embedded in the wicker of the suitcase in which Winnie kept Emlyn’s letters; after a short pause, it resumed its meditative rending of the fibres.

‘Get off,’ said Winnie, pulling the case towards her. Unhurriedly, the cat detached itself and began instead to investigate the fringe of the rug, lifting and carefully examining separate strands, as if working on quality control at the mill.

There was dust on the case. Winnie shoved it back into the narrow gap, and thought immediately of the dark space under the bar of the Fox and Grapes, which had saved three lives today. If she were still sending letters to Emlyn, what platitude would she have written about the last eighteen hours? ‘I’m quite tired after a busy time at work, but nothing that a good night’s sleep won’t cure’? ‘There was a bit of damage in our area, but I’m absolutely fine, so no need to worry’? So much breezy euphemism; if they ever met again, he’d be expecting a twinkling optimist, like Jessie Matthews tap-dancing on a revolving cake while warbling, ‘Over my shoulder goes one care.’

Winnie scratched the top of the cat’s head, and it abandoned the rug and jumped on to her lap. It was thin but healthy-looking and didn’t appear to be pining for its previous minder, whoever he’d been; the dead man’s identity would become a police matter now, she supposed.

She leaned back in her chair, closed her eyes and at once saw the mauve-dappled leg in the ruins, and it was no good, she thought, snapping her eyes open again; she wouldn’t sleep until she could slough off some of these images, and she transferred the cat on to the bed and poured herself a drop of sloe gin. During the Blitz, when every night had been piled with incident, she had tried keeping a diary, but had found it a chore rather than a release; a trip to the pub with her colleagues had always been far more helpful, the horrors unplugged by caustic language and a stream of macabre jokes.