At that moment I thought suddenly that it would be an immense relief to be arrested and charged, convicted and sent to prison. It would halt my endless, hopeless, undirected need to do something. Clearly I had done the wrong thing. I had lied to so many people. Above all – below all – I had lied to Frances. I had betrayed her trust and now she was dead. If I had stayed at home and grieved, as everybody had told me to, and in the end gone back to my work, this probably wouldn’t have happened and maybe, just maybe, Frances would still be alive. I cared about the crimes I had committed. It was possible that my lies and cowardice had stopped Frances’s murder being solved quickly. Maybe I had destroyed an essential clue. But what seemed even more painful was that Frances had thought of me as her friend, as someone she could trust, and everything she had thought she knew about me was a lie.

‘You’re right,’ I said. ‘I deserve to be punished. I’m not going to defend myself.’

‘You bet you fucking deserve it,’ said Ramsay. ‘And don’t pull that pathetic act with us because it won’t work. Maybe we will charge you, and not just for behaving like an idiot either. I’ll need to talk to some people about that. We’re going to think about it. In the meantime, you’re going to supply any physical evidence you have. The clothes you were wearing would be a help.’

‘I’ve probably washed them.’

‘Why was I expecting you to say that?’ said Ramsay.

‘Were you wearing a jacket or a coat?’ said DI Bosworth, speaking for the first time.

‘A jacket,’ I said. ‘I haven’t washed that.’

‘And shoes?’ she continued.

‘Yes, and I haven’t washed them.’

‘When you return home,’ said Ramsay, ‘an officer will accompany you in order to collect any items that may be relevant to the investigation.’

‘So I’m going home?’ I said.

‘Until we decide differently,’ said Ramsay. ‘But before that, you’re going to give us the mother of all statements.’

‘Isn’t that what I’ve done?’

Ramsay shook his head. ‘You’ve only just started,’ he said.

I sighed. ‘It’s a relief, really,’ I said, ‘that someone apart from me is doing the investigating.’

Ramsay looked at me, then at DI Carter, then back at me. ‘That was an investigation? For fuck’s sake.’

Chapter Twenty-seven

The first Christmas I had spent with Greg, we had escaped our families and gone walking in the Lake District. I knew I was in love with him – no, I knew I loved him – when he took a miniature Christmas pudding out of his backpack on the top of Great Gable and insisted we eat it. I can remember it vividly: the cool grey blustery day, the rock we perched on looking out over the empty landscape, the way the wind blew his hair into his eyes and turned his cheeks ruddy, the rich crumbs in my mouth, his warm hand in my cold one, a grateful sense of belonging – of being at home, even though we were up in the hills and far from anywhere. Despite all that had happened, the memory remained intact and robust.

The next Christmas we had spent with Fergus and Jemma, and Fergus and I had cooked a goose; Greg had insisted on making his version of champagne cocktails, singing loudly, filling their house with his tipsy cheerfulness. Last year, we had been in this house; we had planted the small Christmas tree at the end of the garden, planning to retrieve it. I used to dread Christmas; then, with Greg, I had learned to love it. Now I dreaded it again. In ten days’ time I would wake up on my own in this house, which seemed to be on its own downward slide (the faulty heating system, which meant that most of the radiators were lifeless and at best the water was tepid, the freezer kept icing up so that little lumps of ice lay across the kitchen floor, a window was cracked and I hadn’t got round to mending it, a cupboard door was coming drunkenly off its hinges). I’m usually good at mending things – of the two of us, I’d always been the efficient, practical one – but for weeks I’d been unable to summon the energy for domestic maintenance and all of my organizing skills had been used up on Frances and Party Animals.

But now I was going to put my life in order. I’d said that before, but this time I meant it. After weeks of claustrophobic murk and madness, I had to make a fresh start. I had to look ahead, not back – because what lay behind and all around me was so scary and inexplicable. So, I threw myself into clearing up the physical mess of my life. I started each day at six in the morning, when it was still pitch-black outside. I bled the radiators and felt them returning to life; I called in a heating engineer to replace the fan on the boiler; I mended the cupboard door and defrosted the freezer, hacking out months of ice; I measured the broken window and bought a new pane of glass, which I fitted with a glow of competence. I painted the walls of the kitchen white and my bedroom pale grey. I bought new bathmats.

I threw out every jar and tin that was past its sell-by date. I stocked the fridge with healthy food, and every day I made myself proper meals (for breakfast, yoghurt, toast and marmalade or porridge made with half water half milk; for lunch a bowl of pasta with olive oil and Parmesan or a salad; for supper, fish or chicken with one glass of wine). I went to the pool every morning, and swam fifty lengths. I bought myself a new pair of jeans and a grey cardigan.

I met Gwen and Daniel at the cinema. I went through my ledger and billed clients for outstanding payments. I made a list of the work I needed to do and wrote myself a timetable that I pinned on the noticeboard in the kitchen. I put a storage heater in my shed and spent at least eight hours of every day in there, trying to meet deadlines and make up for the broken promises of the past months. I replaced the legs on a Queen Anne sideboard, sanded and revarnished a rosewood table, put a new top on a scratched school desk that clearly had sentimental value to its owner. I even put a notice in the local paper advertising my services, and called at the nearby shops with business cards. I went late-night shopping and bought a beret and miniature dungarees for my soon-to-be godchild, and two beautiful scarves for Gwen and Mary’s Christmas presents. I rang my parents to tell them I would not be with them for the day itself, but would it be all right if I came on Boxing Day instead? I bought my mother a glass vase and my father a book on houseplants. I drew the line at sending Christmas cards, and the ones that arrived for me I put in a pile on the kitchen window-sill so that I didn’t have to read the dozens of sympathetic messages behind pictures of robins, virgins and comic turkeys.

And I did not look at the newspaper, so that I would not have to read any stories about Frances. I did not turn on the television for the same reason.

I did not respond to the message Johnny had left on my answering-machine, or reply to the long, angry letter he pushed through the door.

I did not investigate the missed calls on my mobile, though I suspected they might have been from David.

I did not go back to the counsellor, even though she had made it clear she thought it would be useful, not to say necessary.

I did not take up Gwen or Mary or Fergus or Joe on their offer to talk about what had happened, or describe in detail how the police had behaved towards me, particularly during the second interview I had had in Stockwell – their mixture of mounting incredulity and moral disgust. I was attempting to look ahead, move ahead, and the only way I knew how to do that was to blinker myself, choosing not to see what lay at all sides and behind me.

I did not let myself think of Frances, spread out under the desk with her sightless eyes staring up at me.

I did not insist to anyone who crossed my path that Greg had never known Milena. I understood at last that the past was gone and beyond my comprehension.