‘This is probably evidence of some kind,’ I said. ‘Before the police grab it, we should share it out.’

But Davy stopped me. ‘For goodness’ sake, Astrid, people are already looking at us. Don’t flash money around in a place like this.’

It was probably more to do with embarrassment than fear but I gave a shrug.

‘I’ll do the maths,’ said Pippa. ‘Then we can arrange to meet tomorrow somewhere a bit more salubrious. It’ll be an excuse for another farewell drink.’

There were nods all round as we stood up, buttoned our jackets and went out into the street together. The rain had stopped and darkness fallen, though the last traces of day still glowed on the horizon. The air was warm and beneath the petrol fumes and curry I could smell blossom.

‘Don’t you love London?’ I said dreamily, to no one in particular. Then: ‘Oh, fuck, someone’s slashed both my bike tyres.’

‘How mean,’ said Pippa indignantly. ‘Can you mend them?’

‘Not without my repair kit. Never mind. I’ll just have to leave the bike here and come back tomorrow.’ I looked at them all, grouped on the pavement. ‘Well, this is it, then.’

‘Till tomorrow.’

I hugged Pippa, gripped the others by the arm. Owen stopped me. ‘Astrid,’ he said, in a low voice. ‘Don’t go just yet. Please.’

I hesitated, then took his hand. ‘Saul’s expecting me,’ I said. ‘And besides – well, this is the wrong time for anything except sleep. Maybe it will always be the wrong time – after this.’

‘Don’t say that.’

‘We’ll see each other tomorrow, Owen. I’m not going anywhere.’

‘You’re right. Try to rest. I hope your dreams are peaceful.’

I found it hard to go. I knew we were meeting the next day, and yet it felt that this was the last time I would see them. At last, with a final wave, I was gone from them. I looked back once to see them dispersing, a group breaking up into its individual parts, then walked along the street in the direction of the underground station. A police car passed me from the opposite direction, but for once it had nothing to do with me – some other victim and some other crime. And as I walked, past the crowded bars and the closed-up shops, through the pools of light cast by street-lamps, under the narrow bridge where a couple stood entwined and pigeons nested, the horror thinned. For a few moments I thought only of the sound my feet made on the pavement, felt only the last heat of the day on my face, saw only the road in front of me as it curved round the corner. The story was over, but summer had only just begun.

Part Two

Chapter Twenty-five

Astrid was the last obstacle. Once she was dead I’d be free. And it wouldn’t be so hard. There wasn’t much to it. The trick was learning that there was no trick.

Killing the first time was like losing my virginity. I had broken through. I had stepped into a new world of adulthood and I expected people to be able to see it in me, a new glow in the eyes, a sense of power. But they couldn’t and that was good too. It was like losing my virginity in other ways as well: a messy, almost farcical fumbling, a struggle on a sofa, a sort of embarrassment and disbelief. A stickiness. She was called Jenny. The first I had sex with, I mean; not the first I killed. She was fifteen, she was folded up against me, half dressed, her cheek stained. Suddenly she felt heavy. I remember wishing that she would just go away. Which she couldn’t, because it was at her parents’ house. And it was like that with the killing as well, because after it had happened, after the spasm, after the thrill and the intimacy, my main thought was: Is that it? Is that all? Is it as easy as that?

I looked at Jenny, lying against me, one breast exposed, nuzzling into me. It was the first time for her as well. Really, she was the one who had started it, squeezing my hand at a party, even giving me a Valentine, inviting me to the house when her mum was out. I saw now that she really cared, cared about what had happened, cared about me. Now she leaned over to me and kissed my cheek and I was really quite fascinated. This was going to be the story of her first time, maybe even of her first love, and I had felt nothing at all. While it was taking its course, I had felt we were like two actors playing a scene and playing it badly. And then I realized that Jenny didn’t know she was an actress. She thought it was real.

It’s like the cat we had when I was little. We only had a postage stamp of a garden, with the railway embankment behind it. But when he wasn’t asleep, he spent his whole life out there, staring into a bush. I never saw him catch anything but we’d find the evidence under the kitchen table. Small birds without heads, a mole, the bottom half of a rat. He was a pathetic pet cat fed from a tin, he had been bred for hundreds of years just to be a sort of fluffy toy, but somewhere, deep down, he still thought he was a lion prowling through the jungle.

Sometimes, when I was growing up, I wanted to shout at people: ‘You don’t think any of this is real, do you?’ I hardly ever did, though, hardly more than just once. I was eleven years old and in my first year of secondary school. Some of us were sitting at the back of the class during a boring maths lesson and a boy called Daniel Benton was sticking the sharp end of a compass into his arm. Paul Leigh said he could make himself bleed and he pushed the point into his forearm. We leaned over and saw a little red full stop on his white skin.

I laughed and Paul Leigh whispered furiously at me that I wouldn’t dare do that. Immediately I felt a sense of power. ‘Give me the compass, then,’ I said. ‘Give me it and I’ll show you.’

It was a once-in-a-lifetime, never-to-be-repeated show. Things quickly got hazy but I remember someone started to cry and a desk got knocked over and there was a bustle and I was dragged out of the room, leaving a red smear behind me.

When you do something like that, you don’t even get into trouble. It’s too big. It doesn’t fit into the system of punishments. After the nurse and the day in Casualty, I was summoned to see my form teacher and the headmaster at the same time. They talked to me in subdued, sympathetic voices. When I came out of the office, my mum was sitting on the bench, crying. I hugged her while looking over her shoulder, hoping I wouldn’t be spotted by anybody I knew.

In the end, I was sent to see a doctor. He wore a sweater and had a room with brightly coloured posters on the wall and toys on the floor. He got me to look at pictures and talk about them, and then he asked me about my life. I was only eleven but I think I saw quickly what the rules were. He wasn’t a real doctor – he didn’t want to help me or to make me better. He wanted to test me to see if I’d give myself away, to show that I wasn’t like the others. It was like the bit in science-fiction films where you have someone who might be an android or might be a human being and you’ve got to ask them questions to see if you can tell the difference. That’s what he was doing with me. In the pictures there were two people or three people, and he wanted me to talk about the relationship between them. It was obvious that I was meant to see them as nice and normal. So I said about the first one that it looked like a mother and a child and that maybe she had just collected him from school. He asked where I thought the father was and I said he was probably at work. I looked at the doctor and he smiled and nodded.

What is strange, when I look back, is that I clearly knew what not to say to the doctor. I told him that the stuff with the compass had been a mistake. I didn’t know what had come over me. That wasn’t a total lie. It had been a mistake. For once, I had let the mask slip. I had done something real. I had broken through the pretend game that everyone was playing and showed them blood and bone and they hadn’t liked what they saw.