Detective Chief Inspector Stoner, waiting for something. Waiting for some hidden truth to reveal itself. He was never going to let us go, I saw now. It should have ended with Leo going away, but it had not.

Every now and again, Stoner lifted a bottle to his mouth, his eyes drifting across to our house, his thoughts loud and clear.

Guilty.

Guilty.

Guilty.

‘Sorry?’

The girl from Tara’s office was suddenly standing beside me. Skyla. She was dressed in some sort of silky, floaty outfit, like a bridesmaid dress, and had a laptop tucked under her arm.

‘The music?’ she said.

Ah – the music. It was on loud – very loud. The Doors in their pomp. The volume I had grown accustomed to in the time that I had the free run of the house. Too loud.

She smiled apologetically. ‘I was trying to make a few calls—’

‘Sorry, I’m so thoughtless,’ I said, and went to lift the arm from the record player and The Doors were suddenly silent.

We smiled at each other, both embarrassed. She had good teeth but one of the front ones was chipped, making her smile a little lopsided and gappy. I liked it.

‘And are you OK?’ I said.

She nodded towards the kitchen, where she was working now that their office was gone.

‘Oh, I’m fine, all I need is a good Wi-Fi connection.’

‘No, I meant – you know. After the fire. It must have been horrible.’

‘We didn’t have time to think about it. Tara and I. It’s worse for our neighbour – for Wiggy. Angel Eyes can work anywhere, but Wiggy – he lost everything. Tara – your wife – has been … incredible.’

You too, I thought. Everybody loves my wife.

Skyla picked up the album I had been playing. Jim Morrison’s face at its most thin and beautiful, his finely cut features swimming in an exploding galaxy of planets, or maybe it was just the dream inside your head.

‘Weird Scenes Inside the Gold Mine,’ she read, as if for the first time, as if it was a funny title for a record.

I nodded. ‘The title is a line from one of their most famous songs, “The End”. They used it in Apocalypse Now. This is an important record because it was the first compilation they released after Jim Morrison died in a bathtub in Paris.’

I felt my face growing red as I realised that this young woman in a pink bridesmaid dress had never heard of Jim Morrison. I ploughed on. ‘So it’s a celebration of genius, conceived in grief.’

Once upon a time, this pretentious bollocks would have gone down quite well with the girls. Oh, where had those glory days gone? Skyla smiled politely.

‘The Doors, yes,’ as if, now she came to think of it, they did ring a distant bell somewhere. ‘I think my dad liked them. Or maybe my granddad? They did “LA Woman”, right? The Billy Idol song?’