‘God,’ I said. ‘Mick.’

‘Mick.’ Pippa grinned.

‘Will you do it again?’

‘I shouldn’t think so. It wasn’t like that. It was just fun.’

‘Won’t it be awkward between you?’

‘Why should it?’

I found it difficult to answer. ‘It would be awkward for me, I guess.’

‘I just thought you’d want to know.’

‘Yes,’ I said dubiously.

‘How about you?’

‘Me?’

‘Your love life.’

‘I don’t have a love life at present.’

‘No?’

‘No!’

‘Then you’re going to, aren’t you?’

‘I don’t know what you’re on about.’

‘Come on, Astrid. Owen. I saw the way you were looking this morning. And then not looking. I could have sworn you two had…’

I felt I was being cajoled into sharing confidences. But I wasn’t in the mood for bantering and giggling.

‘There isn’t any “you two”, and I wasn’t looking like anything. I was helping Mick make bacon butties.’

‘This is me you’re talking to, world champion at deciphering erotic glances in the morning. He’s gorgeous and he’s free. Why don’t you pounce? I would. Hey, can I borrow this shirt tomorrow?’

‘All right.’

‘Mick’s got a huge scar on his back. That was rather thrilling.’

Chapter Eight

Some days you draw the short straw. I got up just before seven, ignored Owen, dodged Miles, stepped round Davy, who was dismantling a crooked lintel and muttering something about ‘resident cowboys’, grabbed a piece of toast on my way out, switched on my radio – and immediately there was a message from Campbell telling me to pick up a package in Canonbury and take it to Camden Town. Twenty minutes later, as I was slogging along Hampstead Road on an empty stomach with car fumes in my face, the radio crackled again and he told me I might as well go straight from Camden Town up to Highgate to collect a package. Highgate is up a steep hill. It was a house I’d been to before and it was as high as it was possible to get in London.

Once, on the way up, I had passed a sign helpfully informing me that I was as high as the tip of St Paul ’s Cathedral. The woman who lived there was wealthy and chic and I thought she was one of those people who doesn’t see poverty or disease or tramps in doorways. She lived in a different world, one of entitlement, and she treated us messengers like servants, which is, I suppose, what we were. She never recognized me. I was just part of the crowd of people who smoothed her way. One of the stories I told the gang at the Horse and Jockey was how I had been summoned once to collect a Japanese takeaway at the bottom of the hill and take it up to the top. As I handed it over, puffing and sweating while she was immaculate in her linen and her jewellery, I had thought that this was the sort of thing that provoked revolutions.

‘Why me?’ I asked, into the radio.

‘Because you’re there.’

So I dropped off the package in Camden Town, grabbed a sweet crêpe and a coffee from the stand in the high street, and set off in the faint drizzle. There were seriously rich people in Hampstead and Highgate, tasteful shops, expensive restaurants, exclusive schools where girls in pork-pie hats and boys in blazers got dropped off by mothers in four-wheel drives, tall and gracious houses with walled gardens and alarms blinking over their front doors, golf courses. The house was set back from the road. A tulip tree was flowering in the front garden and a pruned wisteria over the decorative porch, two huge empty earthenware pots standing at either side of it. I had never gone inside and only ever glimpsed the hall, which was twice the size of my bedroom and smelled of polish, paint, leather and money.

I swung myself off my bike, leaned it carefully against one of the porch’s pillars, and rang the doorbell. I waited for thirty seconds or so, heard nothing, then rang again, for longer this time, and stepped back. Nobody came. A satisfying little bubble of anger formed in my chest. They make some poor sod cycle all the way up the hill at whim, then can’t be bothered to be there.

I pulled out my mobile, noting the time, nine forty-one, and called Campbell to check there wasn’t some kind of mistake, but the line was busy. I rapped the door knocker hard.

Again, nothing. I knelt down in front of the letterbox and prised it open. It was one of those that are angled in such a way that you can only make out a small strip of the interior. I peered through and saw the first few carpeted steps of the stairs. I twisted my head so my nose was pushed against the aperture and made out the glossy wooden floorboards of the hall. And something else besides. I squinted and squashed my face closer into the door. Something smooth, pale brown. It looked like skin, a segment of an arm. I half stood, bending at a painful angle to get a better look. A segment of forearm becoming a wrist, and then, no matter how I twisted my face, I could see no further.

I called through the letterbox. I could hear my voice bounce round the clean empty spaces of the house. ‘Can you hear me?’

The arm, if that was what it was, remained still. I scrambled to my feet and hammered at the door with both fists, then pressed the bell once more, its discreet chime repeating. I looked again through the letterbox. There was no movement.

There was only one thing to do. For the first time in my life I dialled 999. A voice answered. ‘Which service, please?’

I had to make myself think.

‘Ambulance, I guess. I think someone might be hurt or ill. Someone’s lying on the other side of the door. I can see the arm.’

I gave the address and said I would wait until they arrived, then walked up and down the small stretch of grass, not knowing what to do with myself. Maybe whoever it was had had a heart-attack or a stroke. Or had fallen down the stairs and knocked herself unconscious. Or maybe it wasn’t an arm at all, I thought, and someone would stroll up the road just as the ambulance arrived with its blue lights flashing and I would look like the idiot of the year.

But if it really was something like a heart-attack, shouldn’t I do something about it right now? Or if she’d cut herself and was bleeding profusely, wasn’t it important to tie a tourniquet round her? Didn’t every second count? I should have asked them on the phone. Who would know? I thought of calling Mick – if he’d been in the army, surely he’d know things like that – but quickly changed my mind. Mick was probably at work, but if he wasn’t he was at the top of the house and never answered the phone. I’d get Dario instead.

I rattled the door. I stood back and searched the upper floor for an open window I could climb through. I pulled my tool-kit out of my pannier: screwdrivers, adaptable spanners, inner tube, Swiss Army pen-knife. Useless. Before I fully understood what I was doing I picked up my entire bike and swung it against the large window to the left of the porch. The glass shattered and there was a violent shriek of a burglar alarm.

With my gloved hand, I knocked the remaining jagged pieces of glass from the frame so that I could climb through. I was standing in an opulently furnished living room. I walked through it and out into the hall. On the gleaming boards a woman lay face down. One arm was flung above her head, and one knee was bent. For a moment, I simply stood and stared down at her, unable to move, with the alarm throbbing in my eardrums. Bobbed blonde hair, expensively highlighted. Tanned skin. A blue silk dressing-gown riding up over her slim, impeccably waxed legs. I crouched beside the figure and, with a feeling of absolute dread, put a hand out to touch her arm. It was still warm. I gasped with relief, then tried to pull the motionless body on to its back. I jerked back in horror, letting go of her as I did so. Her head hit the floor with a thump. It wasn’t just the eyes, open and glassy, staring upwards. Or the lips, swollen and blue. Her smooth face looked as if it had been drawn on with a red pen. But then I saw that the lines weren’t drawn but incised, slashes on her cheek and forehead and even across one eye. The iris was crushed, something white oozing out from it.