She was taken aback to see me and referred almost immediately to the news of my death, but we shared enough common history for me to be able to persuade her that she was mistaken.

I wonder a little at her readiness to accept my word. But then we had both aged, we were both heavier and clumsier; not the lithe teenage carcasses who had shared narrow single beds at university and slept soundly, entwined like snakes.

She was in the throes of a separation and I couldn’t help imagining the life that we might have shared had things turned out differently. In this counterfactual existence, the other Nicholas Slopen lived in this pretty town with this kind and loving woman. I wondered hopelessly as I left her if the last twenty years were simply a terrible mistake, culminating in my being cut adrift in this stranger’s carcass, and with no way back to my loved ones.

*

I returned to London with a renewed appetite for the struggle. What I had not foreseen was the terrible pull that my old life would exert.

Nicholas’s death, terrible as it was, had freed me to love my children again. After my sojourn in the Midlands, all I wanted was a glimpse of them: just to see my flesh alive, all that was left of me. The pressure of this old yearning began to dissolve my singlemindedness.

*

They were living in a big town house, a temple to Poggenpohl and Bose and Aga and all the other deities of Morestuffism, with absurd topiary in zinc bins on the windowsills.

To begin with, I deluded myself that it was reconnaissance. I took to loitering in the area and was rewarded with tantalising glimpses of them through the basement window.

At Notting Hill Gate one Friday afternoon, Sarah took an Evening Standard from me with a fragrant gloved hand. I felt a flash of parental concern when I detected the smell of cigarette smoke mingled with her perfume. She had a mobile phone pressed to her ear. She was taller and walked with a woman’s poise: so beautiful, so like her mother. Her face was pale. I thought of the grief she had suffered. And underneath it all, there was still a fugitive trace of the face she had had as a child. Even in her early teens, when sleeping, Sarah’s face fell into the expression she wore on the ultrasound, twenty weeks from conception, which so enraptured us.

I staggered outside and wept in the slush: the grimy aftermath of this year’s extraordinary snow. I should have made my renunciation then, but like any addict I needed a progressively more potent fix.

At this stage, I was homeless and broke. Nicholas’s ATM card had stopped functioning in the middle of January.

There was a shelter in Vauxhall with all the anomie of the DHU but less actual insanity. I gave away free papers, took food hand-outs and foraged in bins. My carcass, oddly, seemed to flourish under the abuse. This peasant body is built for suffering. It’s slow and clumsy, but indifferent to cold and shocking in its outright strength. One evening at the shelter I came back from the dank bathroom to find someone nosing in the drawer under my bed. I lifted him clean off the ground by the throat until his face went purple, and felt not much more than mild surprise and the detachment of someone operating a powerful crane.

Through January, I stole into their back garden a number of times and watched them in the glass box of the rear extension, performing the numberless mundane rituals that are the weft of family life. I deluded myself that I was in control of my habit, but then the unforeseeable shock came.

Risking the lightening dusk of February to creep along the rear wall around five o’clock one afternoon, I saw Leonora and Lucius and Hunter’s girlfriend, Candy Go, sitting at the granite slab of dining table.

Nicholas, of course, had told me in Crimea that Candy and Leonora were friends. They met at the gym after Leonora decamped to West London. Leonora had been quite open about it with Nicholas. But it wasn’t a conversation she’d had with me. And the recollection of Nicholas’s words did not carry enough force to overbear the injustice of what I seemed to see in front of me: cordiality between Nicholas’s family and his killers. It drove me out of my mind.

The betrayal seemed vast and unconscionable. I could only think of Nicholas’s death, his broken body in the wheel arch. I seemed to hear the coroner’s voice in my head. I smashed my way through the glass, gashing my forehead and hands in the process. I howled at Leonora, my voice horribly changed. ‘Why is she here?’ I asked her. ‘Do you know what they have done to your husband?’ Blood dripped from my accusing finger. Candy’s painted mouth was frozen in a mute zero of disbelief. I told them who I was. The horror on Lucius’s face will live with me forever.

I fled and tried to hide in the communal gardens, but the police tracked me within half an hour by my bloodstains. The section was granted even before they found the CCTV footage of my vigils outside the house. I was in the DHU the following day.

32

Extracted from Dr Webster’s Journal

*

Cambridge. Strange to be here, but strangest of all to be going for this reason. Dismal cheap hotel. Embarrassed about my own behaviour. I tell myself that I’ll only need to go on this wild goose chase once. It’s a form of reality testing. There are only three possibilities: one, that Q’s is a severe and complex psychotic delusion which bears no relation to reality; two, that it’s a severe and complex psychotic delusion which bears some relation to reality; and three. Three is the one that I’m most worried about.

Am I insane to even be, even to be contemplating this? I don’t feel mad. As Q would say.

I realise I’m on ethical thin ice – it’s a mark of how much Q has got under my skin that I can hear him complaining about that metaphor. The issue around reading his diary. His testimony, he calls it. Maybe this foolish quest simply to assuage my guilt about violating his privacy?

So much militates against Q’s story. I’ve seen a photo of Dr Slopen and he’s physically quite distinctive: lean and tending to fair-haired. It just goes against common sense. So why am I here?

In Q’s earliest sessions he talked in more detail about the procedure he claimed to have undergone: I failed to make notes on it as I was following PW’s advice to pay attention to underlying affect. In any case, I suspect Q’s understanding of science sketchy at best.

Feel like I’m turning into that minicab driver with the smelly car. He looked like Gandalf: ‘Conspiracy theories. It’s an interesting area if you’re mentally stable.’

*

He’s much as I pictured him. Older, but still handsome. The hair a bit thinner than described but just enough of it to coax into a quiff. It helps that I’m a woman. He’s the kind of old-fashioned sexist who fusses over the girls and saves his academic crushes for the boys.

I arrive at three thirty and touchingly he’s laid out a proper tea for both of us: swiss roll, toast and honey, Tunnock’s caramel wafers. ‘So rare to get visitors. Life’s slowed down since I retired. Can it really be ten years?’ he says, sounding theatrically dizzy at the rate time is passing. I wonder out loud how he keeps track of his old students. That makes him terribly serious all of a sudden. ‘I remember every one of them, my dear.’ I understand that it’s important to him to have done his job well. What else is there? No Mrs Harbottle. No little ones to worry about.

‘And you say you’re a doctor, but the medical kind, Miss Webster?’

I nod. Say how much I enjoyed English A level, but after Dad died …

He sweeps the unpleasantness hastily aside. I remember that’s one of the reasons I did medicine. All this reading about love, death, insane passions, but when someone presents you with it in real life, you turn away. Hiding away in books, as though the answer’s in The Franklin’s Tale. He asks politely about my work. I tell him.