The anger went out of me. I moved his head to a more comfortable position, fetching a cushion from the hall. As I propped his crushed face a tooth fell out. Gold. I put his glasses on the hall table and walked slowly down the steps towards the car. The hot date was half in half out, her mouth fluttering like a moth. ‘God. God, oh my God, God.’ As though repetition might achieve what faith could not.

The phone dangled uselessly from its strap around her wrist. I could hear the crackly voice of the operator ‘Fire Police Ambulance. Which service do you require? Fire Police Ambulance. Which …’ I took the phone gently. ‘Ambulance. 52 Nightingale Square, NW3.’

When I got back to my flat it was dark. My right wrist was badly swollen and I was limping. I put ice into a couple of carrier bags and Sellotaped them around my gammy limbs. I wanted nothing but sleep and I did sleep on the dusty unchanged sheets. I slept for twenty hours then got a cab to the hospital and spent almost as long in the Outpatients Department. I had cracked a bone in my wrist.

In plaster up to my elbow I made a list of every hospital that had a cancer unit. None of them had heard of Louise Rosenthal or Louise Fox. She was not undergoing treatment anywhere. I spoke to her consultant who refused to tell me anything except that he was not advising her at that time. Those friends of hers I had met had not seen her since May when she had suddenly disappeared. I tried her solicitor for the divorce. She no longer had a contact address. After a great deal of difficulty I persuaded her to give me the address she had been using during the case.

‘You know this is unethical?’

‘You know who I am?’

‘I do. And that is why I am making an exception.’

She disappeared to rustle among her files. My lips were dry.

‘Here we are: 41a Dragon St NW1.’

It was the address of my flat.

I stayed in London for six weeks until the beginning of October. I had resigned myself to charges being brought against me for whatever damage I had done to Elgin. None came. I walked over to the house to find it shuttered. For reasons of his own I wouldn’t be hearing from Elgin again. What reasons when he could avenge himself on me, possibly with a prison sentence? It horrifies me to think about that madness, I’ve always had a wild streak, it starts with a throbbing in the temple and then a slide into craziness I can recognise but can’t control. Can control. Had controlled for years until I met Louise. She opened up the dark places as well as the light. That’s the risk you take. I couldn’t apologise to Elgin because I wasn’t sorry. Not sorry but ashamed, does that sound strange?

In the night, the blackest part of the night, when the moon is low and the sun hasn’t risen, I woke up convinced that Louise had gone away alone to die. My hands shook. I didn’t want that. I preferred my other reality; Louise safe somewhere, forgetting about Elgin and about me. Perhaps with somebody else. That was the part of the dream I tried to wake out of. None the less it was better than the pain of her death. My equilibrium, such as it was, depended on her happiness. I had to have that story. I told it to myself every day and held it against my chest every night. It was my comforter. I built different houses for her, planted out her gardens. She was in the sun abroad. She was in Italy eating mussels by the sea. She had a white villa that reflected in the lake. She wasn’t sick and deserted in some rented room with thin curtains. She was well. Louise was well.