I walked to the top of the stairs and looked down. The light was on in the hall, but all the rooms were dark. I gulped. Suddenly it was hard to breathe. Stupid. This was stupid, stupid, stupid. I was safe, absolutely safe. There were two men outside, all the doors and windows were locked, double-locked. There were ugly iron grilles on the downstairs windows. A burglar alarm. A light that turned on in the garden when anyone passed it.

I went into the room that would be a spare bedroom, and turned on the light. Half a wall was papered, the rest just lined. The rolls of wallpaper were stacked in the corner, waiting beside the stepladder and the trestle table. The brass bed was in pieces on the floor. The room smelled musty. There was a hot bubble of rage in my chest; if I opened my mouth it would come out as a scream. A scream that would go on and on, ripping into the silent night, waking up everyone in the city, telling them to beware. I pressed my lips together. I had to put my life in order. Nobody else was going to do it for me, that was clear. Clive wasn’t around. Leo and Francis and Jeremy and all the rest of them had gone, as if they’d never been here. Mary crept round me as if I was contagious, and I was lucky if she emptied the wastepaper baskets nowadays. Tomorrow I would tell her I didn’t need her anymore. The police were all stupid, incompetent. If they had been my workmen, I would have fired them by now. I would just have to rely on me. It was just me, now. I felt a tic start up under my right eye. When I put my finger there, I could feel it jumping, like an insect under my skin.

I picked up the box of wallpaper paste and read the instructions. It all seemed simple enough. Why did everybody make so much fuss about it? I would start with the room and then I’d move through my life, putting it all back together again, just like it was before.

Clive arrived home about half an hour later. I heard the key in the door and froze for an instant, until I heard him take off his shoes and pad into the kitchen, where he turned on the tap. I didn’t stop what I was doing. I didn’t have time. I was going to finish this before morning.

“Jenny,” he called when he went into our bedroom. “Jens, where are you?”

I didn’t reply. I slapped the paste onto the wallpaper. “Jens,” he shouted, from our bathroom this time, the one that was going to have Italian tiles one day. The hem of my nightdress was sodden with paste, but that didn’t matter. The bandage on my hand was soaked as well, and my finger throbbed harder than ever. The most difficult part was putting the paper on straight, and without any bubbles. Sometimes I put on too much paste and it stained through the paper. That would dry, though.

“What on earth do you think you’re doing?” He stood in the doorway in his white shirt and red boxer shorts and the socks that bloody Father Christmas had given him last year.

“What does it look like?”

“Jens, it’s the middle of the night.”

“So?” He didn’t say anything, just stared around the room as if he didn’t quite know where he was. “What does it matter if it’s the middle of the night? What does it matter what time it is? If nobody else is going to do it, I’m going to do it myself. And you can be pretty sure that nobody else is going to do it. If there’s one thing I’ve learned it’s that if you want something done, do it yourself. Mind where you step, for goodness’ sake. You’ll ruin everything and then I will have to do it all over again and I don’t have time for that. Had a good day, did you? Good day at the office till three in the morning, darling?”

“Jens.”

I climbed up the ladder, holding up the sticky paper, which twisted round on itself.

“I blame myself,” I said. “I’ve let everything go to pieces, that’s what. I didn’t notice at first, but now I see. A few silly letters, and we let the house fall down, fill up with dirt. Stupid.”

“Jens, stop this now. It’s all crooked anyway. And you’ve got glue in your hair. Come off that ladder now.”

“The master’s voice,” I hissed.

“You’re behaving in an unbalanced way.”

“Oh really! How should I be behaving? I’d like to know. Take your hand off my ankle.”

He backed off. A violent ache sprang up behind my eyes.

“Jenny, I’m going to phone Dr. Thomas.”

I looked down at him.

“Everyone uses that tone of voice with me, as if there was something the matter with me. There’s nothing the matter with me. They just need to catch this person and we’ll be back to normal. And you”-I flourished my gluey brush at him so a drop fell on his frowning, upturned face-“you’re my husband, in case you had forgotten, darling. For better or for worse, and this is for worse.”

I tried to smooth the paper onto the wall, bending down at a painful angle with my damp nightdress slapping against my shins, and prickles of dust and grime on my feet, but it creased terribly.

“It’s hopeless,” I said, staring round the room. “It is all completely hopeless.”

“Come to bed.”

“I’m not in the least bit tired, thank you.” And indeed I wasn’t. I was fizzing with energy and rage. “But if you want to do anything to help, you can phone Dr. Schilling and tell her it is at the very best dull, thank you very much. She’ll understand what I mean. You look pathetic in your socks,” I added spitefully.

“All right. Have it your own way.” His tone was a mixture of indifference and contempt. “I’m going to bed now. You do what you want. That strip is on back to front, by the way.”

At six, Clive left for work. He called good-bye as he left, but I didn’t bother to reply. Chris got himself up that day. I shouted at him to get his own breakfast. He stood and watched me for a few minutes, looking as if he was about to cry. Just the sight of him, standing in his blue pajamas with teddy bears, looking sad, with his thumb in his mouth, made me feel scorched with anger and impatience. When he tried to hug me, I shrugged him off, telling him I was all sticky. When Lena arrived, he ran to her as if I were his wicked stepmother. A new sidekick and pretend-best-friend, a small woman with a face like a fox who introduced herself as Officer Page, marched round the house, checking all the windows. She came into the spare room and said good morning to me in a careful voice, as if she was pretending that it was quite normal to find me decorating in my nightclothes. I ignored her too. Idiot. I had no use for any of them, no confidence in them at all.

When I had finished the walls, I had a bath. I washed my hair three times, waxed my legs, shaved under my arms, plucked between my eyebrows. I applied new varnish on my nails and put on more makeup than usual, lots of foundation because my skin looked oddly blotchy, a bit of blusher to give me color, eyeliner. My face was a mask. But I couldn’t keep my hand steady. The lipstick kept going outside my lips, which gave me the look of a drunken old woman. I got it right eventually: discreet plum color, hardly noticeable. It was me again in the mirror. Jennifer Hintlesham: immaculate.

I chose a thin black skirt to wear, with black mules and a crisp white shirt. It was meant to look businesslike, chic, cool. But the skirt hung off my waist. I must have lost weight. Well, every cloud has a silver lining.

I told Lena to take Chris to the London aquarium and then buy him lunch. Chris said he wanted to stay with me, but I blew him a kiss and told him not to be silly, he would have a lovely day. I gave Mary a week’s wages and told her she shouldn’t bother to return. I ran a finger over the top of the microwave and showed her the dust there. She put her hands on her hips and said she never wanted to come back anyway; the job gave her the spooks.

I made a list. Two lists. The first was of things to do in the house and didn’t take me long. The second was for Links and Stadler and was more complicated, and I drank four cups of strong coffee while I was doing it. They had said anything I could remember might be relevant, hadn’t they?