But somewhere down in your blood and bones, you always know.

There are just too many clues, you see. They rub your stupid, unsuspecting face in the clues. They stuff the clues down your throat until you feel like you are choking. They bury you all in the evidence until you feel like screaming because the evidence is so overwhelming.

The unknown lover is always there, I understood now, even if you don’t see them, even if you don’t touch them, even if you don’t know their name or what they look like or quite how long they have been sniffing around. You know that they are there.

That third person in your bed.

Do you know? How the hell can you not know?

My body ached from a sleepless night in a high white room with a low blue bed stained with bodily fluids that I did not like to think about. Does anyone ever sleep in a police custody suite? For even one second? The bed was almost on the ground. So that the hopelessly drunk do not have to fall very far, I assume. And I was pierced to my core by a grief that was worse than any pain in the world.

I wanted my Tara back.

‘Mr Carver?’

Detective Inspector Gillian Ure was with the Major Crime Unit. She was a copper-haired young woman in glasses that took the edge off her pale beauty. There was a faint West Country burr in her accent that a few years at university and a job in the big city had not been able to completely expunge. She seemed young for the job, I thought. My age. Our age.

DI Ure had not been there when I had checked in – is checking in what you call it? The paperwork of going into police custody felt like checking into the worst hotel in the world. The mind-numbing bureaucracy of getting banged up, all those details they have to get right at the very moment when you are more terrified than you have ever been in your life. Arrival at station. Time of arrest. Offence under investigation. They write it all down. It was only when I heard the name of the offence that any of it began to seem horribly real.

‘You have declined your right to free legal advice from the police station’s duty solicitor,’ DI Ure said. ‘Is that correct, Mr Carver?’

I stared at my hands and they seemed strange to me.

‘You can change your mind at any time about legal advice,’ she continued. ‘You can also instruct us to contact your own solicitor. But we have the right to question you about the crime you are suspected of without a legal representative present. As custody officers we are not allowed to disclose to anyone over the phone that you are under arrest and in custody. However, you have a right to what we call a notified person. Meaning you have the right to nominate someone likely to have an interest in your welfare. Can you think of anyone?’