I made my way as quickly as possible up to the top floor to turn off the water only to discover that doing so was not going to be that easy. The washbasin in the second bathroom had been torn completely away from its fittings and the water was jetting out of a hole in the wall left by a broken pipe. The stream was adding to the inch depth that already existed on the bathroom floor and which was spreading across the landing and down the top few steps like a waterfall.

Where, I wondered, was the stop cock?

I carefully descended the wet stairs again and used the telephone to call my downstairs neighbours to ask for help. There was no answer. There wouldn’t be. It was Wednesday and they were always out late on Wednesdays, organizing a badminton evening class at the school where they both taught. I had become quite acquainted with their routine since I had needed to call on their assistance over the past six weeks. They would have stayed on at the school after lessons and would usually be back by nine, unless they stopped for some dinner on the way home, in which case it would be ten or even half past. By then, I thought, their lower floor, set as it was below ground level, might be more akin to an indoor swimming pool than a kitchen.

I sat on the torn arm of my sofa and looked about me. Everything that could have been broken had been. My brand-new expensive large flat-screen plasma television would show no pictures ever again. Angela’s collection of Royal Worcester figurines was no more, and the kitchen floor was littered deep with broken crockery and glass.

I looked at the phone in my hand. At least that was working, so I used it to dial 999 and I asked the emergency operator for the police.

They promised to try and send someone as soon as possible but it didn’t sound to me like it was an urgent case in their eyes. No one was hurt or imminently dying, they said, so I would have to wait. So I thumbed through a sopping copy of Yellow Pages to find an emergency plumbing service and promised them a big bonus to get here as soon as humanly possible. I was still speaking to them when the ceiling around the light fitting, which had been bulging alarmingly, decided to give up the struggle and collapsed with a crash. A huge mass of water suddenly fell into the centre of my sitting room and spread out towards my open-plan kitchen area like a mini tidal wave. I lifted my feet as it passed me by. The plumbing company promised that someone was already on the way.

I hobbled around my house inspecting the damage. There was almost nothing left that was usable. Everything had been broken or sliced through with what must have been a box cutter or a Stanley knife. My leather sofa would surely be unrepairable with so many cuts through the hide, all of which showed white from the stuffing beneath. A mirror that had hung this morning on my sitting-room wall now lay smashed amongst the remains of a glass-and-brass coffee table, and an original oil painting of a coastal landscape by a successful artist friend was impaled over the back of a dining chair.

Upstairs in my bedroom the mattress had also received the box-cutter treatment and so had most of the clothes hanging in my wardrobe. This had been a prolonged and determined assault on my belongings of which almost nothing had survived. Worst of all was that the perpetrator, and I had little doubt as to who was responsible, had smashed the glass and twisted to destruction the silver frame that had stood on the dressing table, and had then torn the photograph of Angela into dozens of tiny pieces.

I stood there looking at these confetti remains and felt not grief for my dead wife, but raging anger that her image had been so violated.

The telephone rang. How was it, I wondered, that he hadn’t broken that too?

I found out. ‘I told you that you’d regret it,’ Julian Trent said down the wire, his voice full of menace.

‘Fuck off, you little creep,’ I said and I slammed down the receiver.

The phone rang again almost immediately and I snatched it up.

‘I said to fuck off,’ I shouted into the mouthpiece.

There was a pause. ‘Geoffrey, is that you?’ Eleanor sounded hesitant.

‘Oh God. I’m so sorry,’ I said. ‘I thought you were someone else.’

‘I should hope so,’ she said with slight admonishment. ‘I called because I have some good news for you.’

I could do with some.

‘I’ve found a copy of the photo of Millie with the foal.’

CHAPTER 13

It took the emergency plumbers forty-five minutes to arrive at Ranelagh Avenue, by which time not only had the ceiling in my sitting room collapsed but also two ceilings below. I know because I heard about it at full volume from my neighbours when they arrived home at five past nine. It was a shame, I thought, that they had decided not to eat out. They wouldn’t be able to produce much of a dinner in the flood. Only when they came upstairs and saw the state of my place did they understand that it hadn’t been a simple thing like leaving a tap running or overflowing a bath.

The police showed up at least an hour after the plumbers had successfully capped off the broken pipe and departed. Two uniformed officers arrived in a patrol car and wandered through the mess, shaking their heads and denigrating the youth of today under their breath.

‘Do you have any idea who may have done this?’ they asked me.

I shook my head. Somehow not actually speaking seemed to reduce the lie. Why didn’t I just tell them that I knew exactly who had done it. It had been Julian Trent and I could probably find his address, or, at least, that of his parents.

But I also knew that Julian Trent was far from stupid, and that he would not have been careless enough to have left any fingerprints or other incriminating evidence in my house, and that he would have half of London lined up to swear that he was nowhere near Barnes at any time during this day. If he could get himself off an attempted murder rap, I had no doubts that he would easily escape a charge of malicious damage to property. To have told the police the truth would simply have given him an additional reason to come back for another dose of destruction – of me, of my father, or, as I feared most, of Eleanor.

The police spent some time going all round my house both outside and in.

‘Whoever did this probably got in through that window,’ one of the policemen said, pointing at the now-broken glass in my utility room. ‘He must have climbed the drainpipe.’

I had changed the locks and bolstered my security on the front door after the time I’d had an unwanted guest with his camera. I now wished I had put in an alarm as well.

‘Is there anything missing?’ asked one of the policemen finally.

‘I have no idea,’ I said. ‘It doesn’t seem so. It’s just all broken or slashed.’

‘Mmm,’ said the policeman. ‘Mindless vandalism. Happens all the time, sadly. You should be grateful that the whole place isn’t also smeared with shit.’

‘Oh thanks,’ I said rather sarcastically. But Julian Trent wouldn’t have done that for fear of leaving some speck of his own DNA along with it. ‘So what happens now?’ I asked them.

‘If nothing’s been stolen then CID won’t really be interested,’ he sounded bored himself. ‘If you call Richmond police station in the morning they will give you a crime number. You’ll need that for your insurers.’

That’s why I had called them in the first place.

And with that, they left. No photos, no tests, no search for fingerprints, nothing. As they said, no one was hurt and nothing had been stolen, and the insurance would deal with the rest. End of their problem. They had no hope or expectation of ever catching the person responsible, and, to be fair, I hadn’t exactly been very helpful with their inquiries.

I sat on a chrome kitchen stool and surveyed my ruined castle.