As we were preparing to go, so the police arrived. Some were in plain clothes and would be conducting interviews with the occupants of seventy-two Maitland Road – DCI McBride and Paul Kamsky were there, and I thought I saw PC Jim Prebble, like a potato-faced hallucination from earlier days, but I didn’t recognize anyone else. Others came in uniform, carrying bags and cameras, not looking us in the eye; they would be picking their way through each room and even, it became apparent, through the skip and the bin bags into which we’d so hurriedly been pouring our unwanted objects. If it felt like an invasion, that was because it was an invasion. They poured over our threshold like a conquering army, with their IDs, their titles, their notebooks, their evidence kits and their suspicions. I saw the house through their eyes and it was full of dark and ugly secrets; I saw us through their eyes and we were a motley tribe, nervous, defensive and scared. It had become impossible to behave naturally or innocently, or to feel that way.

I watched Dario as he led a male and female officer up the stairs towards his room; he was ashen and red-eyed. Mick scowled at them so that his forehead corrugated and a vein pulsed in his temple. He wasn’t angry, I knew, he was full of terror and uncertainty, and probably all the nightmares from his past were crowding around him again. Only Pippa seemed quite cool, almost interested. She was used to things like this. She moved in the world of law and knew its language.

I went slowly down the stairs and stood in the hall, outside Pippa’s and Miles’s rooms. As I did so, a policeman came up the stairs from the kitchen and knocked heavily on Miles’s door. After a few seconds, Miles opened it. He was dressed in an oddly formal way, in a dark suit with a white linen shirt I had given him a long time ago. His face looked thinner than it had just a few hours ago, and older as well. He stood back and the police officer entered the room. Miles stared at me for a moment, his eyes glittering. Then he smiled faintly and turned away.

‘Astrid?’

I looked round. ‘Well, if it isn’t Detective Chief Inspector Kamsky. You don’t need to interview me again, do you?’

We walked out into the back garden together. I took him to my vegetable patch and pointed. ‘Broad beans, runner beans, potatoes,’ I said. ‘Those ones there are asparagus, but it takes two years to grow, so I doubt if any of us will be eating it. I’m moving out, you know.’

‘You’ll need to inform us of your -’

‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. ‘I won’t run away. I’m going to stay with my friend Saul, not far from here.’

Kamsky didn’t reply. He seemed preoccupied with things he couldn’t say.

‘When will this be over?’ I asked.

‘All I can say is what I tell the team, and that is…’

But I never did find out what he told the team, for at that moment a police officer came walking across the grass towards us and Kamsky stepped away from me. The officer said something, and I saw Kamsky’s face become expressionless. A feeling of absolute foreboding descended on me.

‘Don’t let anyone else in,’ I heard him say, as the officer turned away. Then he looked back at me. ‘You’ll have to excuse me,’ he said, with a curious little bow, as if he was deserting me on a polished dance-floor.

‘What is it? Have they found something?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘They have.’

Chapter Twenty-three

From that moment everything changed. Suddenly I was shut on the outside looking in, not able to see. I asked Kamsky what had happened, what had been found, but he shook his head. He was an impersonal official now, estranged from me. He said it was part of an ongoing investigation and he couldn’t reveal any details. I said I didn’t understand. Were they going to arrest somebody? We were still standing out there in the garden, by my doomed vegetable patch. Kamsky started to speak, then hesitated, then spoke again. ‘I think it’s likely that charges are imminent,’ he said.

‘Who?’ I said. ‘Who’s being charged?’

‘We’ll see,’ he said, then nodded. ‘Come with me.’

Then things happened quickly. A process was under way and we, the residents of seventy-two Maitland Road, were swept along helplessly in it. The house wasn’t ours any more. It had changed even in the time that Kamsky and I had been in the garden. It looked like the site of a sinister biological accident. People were wandering around in white coats with their shoes wrapped in white nylon bags. The rooms on the ground floor were being sealed off with tape.

‘We’d like you all to come into the station with us,’ said Kamsky.

‘Can I fetch something from my room?’ I asked.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Kamsky. ‘You can’t. This is a crime scene now.’

‘What do you mean, a crime scene?’ I said. ‘What crime?’

Dario was being led down the stairs by the two officers I’d seen him with before.

‘Astrid,’ he said. ‘They’re taking us in.’

‘Quiet,’ said Kamsky. ‘I don’t want you to confer.’

So Dario gestured at me helplessly, almost comically, as he was led past me and out into the street. Two men came in carrying arc-lights on metal stands. At the same time I was thinking urgently. In my pockets I had the bundle of money. Was I a suspect? Would I be searched at the police station? Would I have to surrender all the contents of my pockets? Probably not, unless I was the one who was going to be charged. In which case it would look very bad indeed. If there was any chance of it being found, it would be prudent to tell them in advance. But I couldn’t think of a way of saying it that wouldn’t sound strange. ‘Detective Chief Inspector Kamsky, I think I ought to mention that I’ve got twenty thousand pounds in cash in my pocket. It’s not at all relevant to the case, but I thought you might want to know.’

I felt a touch on my arm and started. It was Kamsky. ‘We’re leaving now, if that’s all right,’ he said.

‘Can I take my bike, at least?’ I asked. ‘It belongs to Campbell – and it’s my livelihood.’

He shrugged. ‘Go on, then. A police car will follow you.’

As we were led out, I saw that the street now seemed to be jammed with police vehicles, the brightly coloured cars and vans and then more unmarked vans. Lines of tape sealed off a whole section of Maitland Road in front of our house. Behind the tape a crowd of people was staring. Did they think I was being arrested? That I was a suspect? Was I a suspect? It suddenly occurred to me that I ought to compose my face into a suitable expression. I mustn’t smile. That would look insensitive. I mustn’t cover my face, seem angry or evasive. I needed to look businesslike, every inch the woman who was helping the police with their inquiries. Except that everyone knows that ‘helping police with their inquiries’ is the euphemism for being the main suspect who hasn’t yet been charged. I had to look self-consciously unselfconscious, like the person who really was helping the police with their inquiries. Which is what I was, wasn’t I?

People from the crowd shouted my name as I walked out. I looked around reflexively. They weren’t neighbours or friends. This was London, after all, where you don’t know your neighbours. These were the journalists and photographers who already knew me. What did they think, seeing me with an officer at my elbow? The headline that accompanied the photograph would be the thing that everyone remembered, whatever else happened.

My return to the police station, to the interview room, the plastic moulded chairs, the linoleum, the pimpled wallpaper, was like a recurring dream, coming back to the same place, telling the same story, filling in the gaps in response to the same questions. Except this time I knew that Mick and Davy and Mel and Pippa and Owen and Miles and Dario were sitting in other interview rooms or on benches waiting their turn. For a few minutes I was left alone in the room and I could almost feel their proximity. I felt as if it wasn’t just that we were separating, leaving the house and each other. It was as if one of those wrecking balls had swung into the house and smashed away a whole wall. I thought of half-demolished buildings, where you could see the wallpaper exposed to the rain, and all the innards, the wires and beams and joists, like bones and muscles and tendons spilling out of a wound.