‘This is going so badly,’ he said.

I said I’d catch him later. As I walked away from the house, I phoned Melanie at work again.

‘You’re stalking me,’ she said.

It was the first time she had ever teased me. Was I seeming needy? Putting myself in a position of weakness? ‘Is it a problem?’ I asked.

‘No, no, course not,’ she said.

I told her I’d pick her up from work. There was something I needed to talk to her about. She left her gallery at ten past five. I had more than four hours to kill and nothing to do. The day passed in a fuzzy rush. I wandered the streets looking at passers-by, men in stained trousers drinking lager and talking to themselves, people with headphones, busy shoppers. Everybody inching their way through a crowd of strangers. What did it matter if one or two or three of them disappeared? In a hundred years there’d still be a crowd here, winos talking to themselves, busy shoppers, but they’d be new. The old ones would be dead.

I took Melanie for a coffee. I dropped hints about us all having to leave the house and she blushed and smiled and said maybe we could think of looking for somewhere together, and I nodded and smiled and said we should think about it and maybe we should head home.

As I opened the door, Dario was standing in the hall, wild-eyed. He walked over to us and spoke quietly. ‘Davy,’ he said. ‘Mel.’

At that moment I needed Melanie the way people sometimes need a cigarette. It’s not that you particularly want a smoke. It just gives you something to do with your hands. When you do all the stuff like taking the cigarette out of the packet, putting it into your mouth and playing with lighters or matches, it stops you feeling self-conscious. When Melanie was there, draped around me, doing what I said, agreeing with me, I turned into a new creature: Davy-and-Mel. So sweet, so young and in love. People stopped paying attention. Best of all, she could do the reacting for both of us. I pretended to be numbed by the news, so shocked that I couldn’t even speak. And I watched Melanie as if she was an actress giving a performance. And what a performance. Her pretty pale face flushed, tears filled her eyes, she stammered and asked questions and said she couldn’t believe it and held my arm tight and tried to remember when she had last seen Leah and what Leah had said. I stayed close, my arm round her, silent. I could smell her smooth, newly washed hair.

Pippa heard us and came out of her room. She seemed the most composed of anyone. Suddenly I saw how ridiculous Melanie looked, her cheeks streaked with black, weeping for somebody she hardly knew and couldn’t have cared for.

‘What’s going to happen?’ I asked.

‘How should I know?’ she said. ‘Miles is downstairs. Go and see him.’

‘Wouldn’t it be better if you did?’

She smiled. ‘No,’ she said.

So the two young lovers went downstairs and found Miles sitting alone at the table staring into the air. We made tea and opened tins of biscuits and sat and held hands and murmured and nodded while Miles babbled and cried and talked aimlessly. There was too much talk. It was too confusing, too much to keep in mind. I was worried I would say the wrong thing but I couldn’t think of an excuse to get up and leave him there. And then Astrid came in. She was wearing strange rough clothes: tracksuit bottoms and a T-shirt that clearly weren’t hers. She looked exhausted and rumpled, yet she had the glow about her of someone who had been close to the action.

‘Was it horrible?’ I asked, then realized how fatuous that sounded and Astrid instantly told me so. Miles got up and I could see that he felt more intimate with Astrid than he had with us. He had made do with us because there was nobody else to talk to. He might as well have been talking to himself. Now, with Astrid, he let his guard down and hugged her and talked in a new, raw tone. We watched them curiously.

‘I’ve got something for you,’ he said, then looked round at us awkwardly and said he’d talk to her outside.

They left the kitchen and Melanie turned to me. ‘What was that?’

‘I don’t know. Let’s go upstairs.’

As we walked up, I saw Miles and Astrid in a conspiratorial huddle on the stairs. I heard – thought I heard – Astrid saying, ‘I can’t take twenty thousand in cash, Miles!’ But they looked round, saw me and feel silent. Shutting me out. We eased past them.

‘Everything all right?’ I asked.

Astrid turned away from me. ‘I’ll tell you later,’ she said.

‘If there’s anything…’

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘Yes, thanks.’

But I saw the money in her hands.

Maybe it could be all right. Maybe I could get what I had wanted, after all. I had to keep calm, that was the main thing. Very calm. Not a single wrong move. I was scared to open my mouth in case I said something that would trip me up, and I had to force myself to meet anyone’s gaze because I thought they’d be able to see the thoughts that were swarming in my head. I could barely smile or grimace without worrying that it would be my undoing. It was hard to breathe steadily. Footsteps on the stairs made me giddy. Coming to get me. Knock on the door, hand on the shoulder. No solid ground under my feet. No clear view in front of me. But if I could grope my way through the darkness, if I could only keep my balance, I could still get out of this mess.

I had done all this, killed all these women – no, that wasn’t me, not the real me; it wasn’t my fault, just a stupid accident – and each time come away empty-handed. But now Astrid had all that money. I had seen her go upstairs with it. Twenty thousand pounds in cash. Astrid was in my way and Astrid had the money. My head still hurt, but it also felt as if there was an itch inside it that I couldn’t get at. Get rid of Astrid, take the money. But everything was the wrong way round now, because at any minute the police would descend on the house and they’d find the stuff in Miles’s room and I couldn’t blame another death on him, could I, not if he was in the police station? Shit, shit, shit. Why hadn’t I thought of that? Find another person as well. Owen. That was it. Serve him right. Get him out of the way. Me and Astrid in Brazil. But even through the wild duststorm of my thoughts I could see that it would be pushing it to try to find another fall-guy as well as Miles. Two killers in one house. No. It wouldn’t do.

Chaos in my mind; chaos in the house. People were packing and crying. Dario was bumping a large cardboard box down the stairs and talking to himself. Pippa was throwing clothes out of her door, until the threshold of her room was strewn with them. I opened my window and pushed my head outside, and I could hear voices filtering towards me from Owen’s room. Astrid was in there. She really shouldn’t do that: it only made me angrier. I couldn’t hear everything, only fragments of their talk. Something about leaving. Something about photographs. Photographs. I strained to make out more. Their voices dropped, then rose again. Something about Pippa. That was good. However much time passed, Pippa would always be there, that first lie in the relationship.

The photograph. I wiped my forehead with the back of my hand and swallowed hard. He was going to the police with the photograph, that was it. Everything closing in. I couldn’t breathe. No air left for me. Had to keep calm. Now their voices dropped again. A low murmur. I couldn’t make out the words. Silence. Were they kissing? Touching? Fucking? Were they? Who cared? It didn’t really matter any more. That was all going to come to an end.

Melanie came into the room carrying a mug of tea. Kind, sweet Melanie, sweet enough to make me gag. A look of womanly concern on her face, but she was happy now, I could tell that. She sat beside me on the bed and I buried my face on her shoulder because if I saw her expression of sympathetic tenderness I would have to hit her to make it go away.