She sat down on the sofa next to me, pushing the cat to the end without waking it. Her leg brushed my leg; her shoulder was a few millimetres from mine. When she bent her head to take a sip of her coffee, I gazed at the curve of her cheek, at her long dark lashes. Steam rose into her face, moistening her skin. ‘You’re trembling,’ I said to her softly.

‘Am I?’ She held up her free hand. ‘So I am. I’m tired, Davy. Tired, scared, lonely, at a loss.’ She put the hand on my knee. ‘Do you understand that feeling?’

I put my hand over hers. ‘Do I understand it? Astrid, I’ve spent my whole life feeling like that.’ Tears welled in my eyes but I didn’t try to check them. I was done with pretending. This was my moment, my perfect day. I put down my coffee cup and picked up her hand between both my own.

‘I should have paid more attention,’ she said. She let me lift her hand to my lips and hold it there for a moment. ‘You’re the only person in the whole house to have come well out of all of this. Everyone else went to pieces or turned on other people, except you. You were always calm and kind. Especially to me. Do you think I didn’t notice?’

‘Do you know why, Astrid?’

‘I think so.’ She placed her hand against my cheek. She gazed at me, then leaned forward and, very lightly, kissed my lips. I pulled her to me. Her lips opened under mine, I felt her breasts against my chest. I pushed my hand into her hair and kissed her again, more roughly, tasting blood but that didn’t matter. My Astrid. My destiny. My ending and my beginning.

I pushed her back on the sofa. I kissed her gently, then started to do things I’d wanted to do since the first moment I’d met her. I put a hand on her breast. She smiled blurrily at me and I moved my hand under her cardigan and felt her warm, smooth stomach, then the rough fabric of her bra. I wanted her. I wanted to do everything to her at once. I moved my hand down to her jeans and started to fumble with the button. ‘Wait,’ she said dreamily. ‘We’re got time, Davy. We’ve got all the time in the world.’

‘I’ve waited so long,’ I said.

‘I know,’ she said. ‘I know.’

She sat up, stroked my hair and kissed me. ‘I think I owe you,’ she said.

‘Owe me?’ I was finding it difficult to speak.

She pulled my jacket off and very delicately undid the first button on my shirt. ‘You got Miles out of the way for me, didn’t you?’

‘Maybe,’ I said. ‘What does it matter?’

She smiled at me and kissed me again. I could taste her, wet and sweet. She undid the second button. ‘It matters to me,’ she said, kissing my lips, my face. She kissed my ear and whispered, ‘Tell me. I need to know. I want to know everything about you.’

‘It was easy,’ I said.

She undid the third button and pulled open my shirt. She put her lips against my neck. I moaned. I couldn’t stop myself.

‘So what did you do?’

She lay back on the sofa again. I bent over and kissed her lips. I kissed her hair, breathed it in. The clean soft smell was like a drug that made me feel dizzy and drunk with her. She gave a murmur.

‘It was the paperweight,’ I said.

‘Mm?’

I put my fingers on the fastening of her jeans, and this time she didn’t try to stop me. I undid the fastening, then drew down the zip. I saw her blue knickers, lacy at the top. I put my hand on them. I felt the hair through them, warm under my hand.

‘Tell me,’ she said.

‘The paperweight.’ I said the words to her between kisses. ‘You saw it in my room. I just put it in Miles’s room.’ I pushed my hand deeper under her knickers.

‘No,’ she said. ‘My top. Take it off first.’

I undid the first button. She lay back with her hands raised behind her head, open to me.

‘Peggy was just a mistake,’ I said, undoing the second button and the third. ‘But it was in his room, so the traces were there already.’

‘You?’ she said.

‘Yes,’ I said.

‘Perfect, Davy,’ she said. ‘Perfect.’

And I didn’t know whether she meant me, stroking and kissing her beautiful body, or whether it was because now she finally understood it was me who knew everything and had done everything. I unfastened the last button and pulled the cardigan open and apart.

‘No, it was a mistake. Leah and Ingrid.’

My hands moved to the blue filigreed covering of her bra.

‘What’s this?’ I said, as I saw a black cord running along it and round under her back. I looked at her and her expression had changed suddenly, like a cloud covering the sun, and I knew what it was and I knew that bad things were going to happen. Everything was about to crumble. The darkness would cover everything, like an icy tide coming in. I reached for my jacket, for the spanner in the pocket. I could take her with me. One blow. She would raise her hand. It would shatter her wrist. The next blow would hit her face, immobilize her. Then I could smash those glorious features to jelly. But the jacket was out of reach; the bitch had kicked it away.

I raised myself from the sofa, pushing her back with one hand so that her head knocked against its wooden arm, and then I heard a clatter outside, heavy footsteps. The door opened hard, banging against the wall, and there was a rush of bodies. I let myself be shoved backwards against a wall. They pushed me hard, so that something fell from a shelf and smashed. The pain in the back of my head was like cold water, but a trickle of clear thought seeped into the jumble of my mind.

‘You’re under arrest,’ said a familiar voice. Kamsky. It was like a surprise party. You think you’re having a night alone and suddenly all your friends jump out. You think no one can hear you and all the time they’ve been listening, snooping, prying, spying.

‘No!’ I said. ‘Don’t. Listen – listen, this is a mistake. A stupid mistake, I was just playing along with Astrid. I was talking dirty to excite her. You’d understand that. It was a joke.’

Astrid was sitting on the sofa with her head in her hands. Kamsky looked at her with concern. ‘Are you all right?’

She stood up, then remembered the state she was in. She zipped up her jeans. A female officer stepped forward and removed the wire and microphone. She had to reach round Astrid’s body and disentangle it from her bra. All the time, Astrid looked at me, with an almost speculative expression, as if she was staring at me through the bars of a cage. Her lips curled back.

‘You…’ she began, and then she stopped.

‘You did well, Astrid,’ said Kamsky. ‘Really well, my dear.’

‘He touched me,’ she hissed. ‘I let him. I let him.’

Her hand came to her mouth. Her eyes met mine for a second, then she ran from the room. I heard the sound of vomiting, again and again. Then the sound of a door being locked and then of a shower. Not very flattering. The officers started to get busy. There was rummaging in my pockets. Grubby fingers poking and prodding me. Dirty eyes staring. A nasty fluttering in my head. A nerve was jumping just above my lip. I tried to bite it still, but I couldn’t stop it.

‘You fucking piece of filth,’ said a voice. A uniformed man brandished my spanner in front of my face. ‘What the hell’s this?’

‘I’m a…’ I couldn’t remember the word. What was happening? Pieces of my brain falling off like flaking plaster; words and thoughts cascading away. ‘A builder,’ I managed at last. ‘I keep tools in my pocket.’

‘Admit what you did,’ said Kamsky. ‘Save us all a lot of trouble. Get your friend out of prison.’

I needed to look puzzled. I tried to pull my expression the right way. My face was rubber and cardboard. My mouth felt numb, as if I’d had a stroke or something.

‘Get a guilty man out of prison?’ I said at last. I laughed, tried to laugh. Kamsky drew back slightly. ‘Why would I do that, mate?’

Kamsky’s expression was partly anger and partly a kind of wonderment. ‘You never give up, do you, your kind?’