‘Do you ever hear from him now?’

I shook my head. ‘The thing is, I didn’t actually like him very much. Whatever happened between us, he was never really my friend. So when it was over, and it was quite quickly over – well, that was it.’

‘Out of here.’ He tugged me from the room.

On the top floor I led him briefly into Dario’s room, tripping over a grubby, ripped deck-chair that had somehow survived both the house sale and the skip, then into Mick’s boxy, deserted space.

‘Last but not least,’ I said, standing in front of the closed door, ‘that was where Davy was.’

‘Do you want to go in?’

‘No,’ I said. There was an icy darkness behind that door. If I opened it, it would spill over me. ‘No. I really don’t want to go in.’

He took my hand and his fingers felt strong and warm on mine, full of life.

We went downstairs, where Ponder was waiting.

‘Wait until you see this,’ he said. ‘Someone’s going to spend some money on a new kitchen, sort out the french windows and they’re going to have themselves something spectacular.’

‘What’s this?’ said Emlyn. He walked across the kitchen, took a piece of paper from the wall and handed it to me. As I looked at it I felt an ache in my chest, a prickling behind my eyes. It was the photograph, the only photograph of us all together, the Seven Dwarfs. It had seemed hilariously bad when Davy printed it out; we were falling all over the place, hysterical, slightly drunk. But happy, yes, we looked happy then, squeezed into the frame, out of focus and pushed close up against each other, arms flailing, mouths open in merriment or scowls. Now when I looked at the picture I tried to see behind Davy’s laughing eyes at what he knew and what we didn’t, what he still knew and we didn’t. How could he have done it, taken that group photograph, while the body of Peggy Farrell was lying upstairs? Was that his way of mocking us?

‘Can we go into the garden?’

‘No problemo,’ said Ponder, unlocking the back door. ‘Let me warn you, you’re going to need to use your imagination a bit.’

We stepped outside into the late-autumn sunshine, warm on my cheeks. I looked at my garden and immediately felt the hot tears on my face. I had to take a tissue from my pocket and pretend I was sneezing. The vegetables, the peas, courgettes and potatoes, had bolted and collapsed, rotted and grown again haphazardly, then bolted again. There was a huge sinister bush of rhubarb. There were strings of old stalks winding along the ground.

‘I don’t know what this was supposed to be,’ said Ponder, ‘but the garden is a hundred feet long. Get in one of those designers, like the ones they have on TV, put in some paths, shape some borders – this could be a nice place for a barbecue.’ There was a sudden electric tone of a pop song I could dimly recognize. Ponder took the mobile from his pocket. ‘Excuse me.’

Emlyn was staring up at the exterior of the house. I walked over to him and kissed his cheek. ‘Thank you.’

As we made our way closer to the house I saw a dark patch on the paving-stones. I knelt and touched it with my finger, then smelled it. Nothing. But I knew what it was: oil from when I’d fixed my bike out here. Emlyn looked questioningly at me. I just smiled and shook my head. Ponder snapped his phone shut. ‘So, chaps, what do you think?’

‘I hope somebody nice buys this,’ I said. ‘Someone with children. It’s a place people should be happy in.’

‘But not for you?’

‘Not for me.’

‘Fair enough.’

‘Come on, my friend,’ I said to Emlyn. ‘My love.’

I put my hand in his and led him from there, the place where I’d once lived, in a different world. There were faces at the windows and voices in the silence. There were stories in the shadows. My house of memories; my house of ghosts. I wouldn’t go there again.

So Emlyn and I walked along the road together and I didn’t look back, because it was over. I was in a different story now.

Nicci French