After the inquest I’d persuaded Gwen and Mary to leave and assured them that, yes, I’d be all right and, no, I really didn’t mind being left alone—in fact I wanted it. Gwen asked if I was starting work again and I said I was thinking about it. Probably it would have been a good idea. It would have been therapeutic. I restore furniture, from valuable antiques, all oak burr, rosewood or gleaming mahogany, to someone’s worthless but beloved piece of junk. I’d taken the kitchen table I sat at now off the top of a skip and mended it; the bed that we—I—slept in. I had done up the bookshelves on the wall. Badly paid though it often was, part-time though it usually was, sometimes overtime, sometimes hysterically so, I loved it. I loved the smell of the wood and the wax, the feel of a chisel in my hand. It was where I’d always gone to escape.

But not now. I started with the tiny mezzanine room. It was next to the bathroom and overlooking the garden, which was small and square, dominated by the rickety shed at the end where I stored the furniture I was working on. This was a study of sorts. There was a filing cabinet full of things like accounts, documents, insurance policies; a bookshelf that mostly held manuals and reference books I used for work, and a table I had found in the junk shop at the end of the road, then sanded and waxed it, on which stood Greg’s laptop. I sat down and opened the lid, pressed the starter button and watched icons spring to the screen.

First, the emails. Before I started, I searched “Milena” and “Livingstone” and came up with nothing. I winced at the unopened messages that had arrived since Greg had died. There were about ninety, mostly junk mail and one sent by Fergus about half an hour before I had rung him and given him the news. He was suggesting they run a half-marathon that weekend before watching the football together. I bit my lip and deleted it.