“Pappa,” I coax, “It’s me, Nadia. You can unlock the door now. It’s OK. I’m here.”

After a long while, there is a rattling of the bolt being pulled, and my father peeps round the door. I am shocked by what I see. He is terribly thin-emaciated-and his eyes have sunk back into their sockets so that his head looks almost like a death’s head. His white hair is long and straggles down his nape. He is wearing no clothes below the waist. I take in the terrible shrunken nakedness of his shanks and knees, livid white.

Just at that moment, I catch the policeman and Valentina exchanging glances. Valentina’s glance says: See what I mean? The policeman’s glance says: Blimey!

“Pappa,” I whisper, “where are your trousers? Please put on your trousers.”

He indicates a pile of clothes on the floor, and he doesn’t need to say anything else, for I can already smell what has happened.

“He shit himself,” says Valentina.

The policeman tries to conceal an involuntary smirk.

“What happened, Pappa?”

“She…” He points at Valentina. “She…”

Valentina raises her eyebrows, re-crosses her legs, and says nothing.

“What did she do? Pappa, tell me what happened.”

“She throw water at me.”

“He was shout at me,” pouts Valentina. “Shout bad thing. Bad language speaking. I say shut up. He no shut up. I throw water. Is only water. Water no hurt.”

The policeman turns towards me.

“Seems like it’s six of one and half a dozen of the other,” he says. “Usually the case in domestics. Can’t take sides.”

“Surely you can see what’s going on?” I say.

“As far as I’m aware, no crime has been committed.”

“But isn’t your job to protect the vulnerable? Just look-use your eyes. If you can’t see anything else, you can see that there’s a difference in size and strength. They’re not exactly evenly matched, are they?” I notice once more how much weight Valentina has put on, but despite this, or maybe because of it, there is a kind of magnetism about her.

“You can’t arrest someone because of their size.” The policeman can hardly take his eyes off her. “Of course I’ll continue to keep an eye, if your dad would like me to.” He looks from Valentina to me to my father.

“You are no different to Stalin’s police,” my father suddenly bursts out in a high quavery voice. “Whole system of state apparatus is only to defend powerful against weak.”

“I’m sorry if you think that, Mr Mayevskyj,” the policeman says politely. “But we live in a free country and you are free to express your opinion.”

Valentina swings herself down heavily from the stool.

“I time go working now,” she says. “You clean up you Pappa shit.”

The policeman, too, makes his goodbyes and leaves.

My father sinks down in his chair, but I do not let him rest.

“Pappa, please put on some trousers,” I say. There is something so horrifying about his corpse-like nakedness that I cannot bear to look at him. I cannot bear the look in his eyes-at once defeated and dogged. I cannot bear the stench coming from his room. I have no doubt that Valentina cannot bear it either, but I have hardened my heart: it was her choice.

While my father is cleaning himself up, I search the house again. Somewhere there must be letters from her solicitor, information about her immigration appeal. Where does she keep her correspondence? We need to know what she is planning to do, how long she will be here. To my surprise, I find in the sitting-room, on the table amid the rotting apples, a small portable photocopier. I had overlooked it before, thinking it was some part of a computer, maybe belonging to Stanislav.

“Pappa, what’s this?”

“Oh, this is Valentina’s new toy. She uses it to copy letters.”

“What letters?”

“It is her latest craze, you know. Copying this, copying that.”

“She copies your letters?”

“Her letters. My letters. Probably she thinks it is very modern. All letters she copies.”

“But why?”

He shrugs. “Maybe she thinks to have photocopier is more prestigious than writing by hand.”

“Prestigious? How stupid. That can’t be the reason.”

“Do you know the theory of panopticon? English philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Is design for the perfect prison. Jailer sees everything, from every angle, and yet himself remains invisible. So Valentina knows everything about me, and I know nothing about her.”

“What are you talking about, Pappa? Where are all the letters and copies?”

“Maybe in her room.”

“No, I’ve looked. Not in Stanislav’s room either.”

“I don’t know. Maybe in car. I see she takes everything to car.”

Crap car is sitting on the driveway. But where are the keys?.

“No need for keys,” says my father. “Lock is broken. She locked keys inside boot. I break lock with screwdriver.”

I notice that the car also has no tax disc. Maybe she had second thoughts about driving off in it while the policeman was here. In the boot I find a cardboard box, bursting with papers, files and photocopies. This is what I have been looking for. I bring them into the sitting-room, and sit down to read.

There is so much paper here that I am overwhelmed. I have gone from having no information at all, to suddenly having far too much. As far as I can tell, the letters are not ordered or sorted in any way, not by date or correspondent or content. I start to pull them out at random. Near the front of the box, a letter from the Immigration Service catches my eye. It is the letter setting out their reasons for refusing to grant her leave to remain after her appeal-there is no reference to my father’s statement under duress, but there is a paragraph explaining her rights to a further appeal to a tribunal. My heart sinks. So the last appeal was not the end of the road. How many more appeals and hearings will there be? I make a copy of the letter on the small portable photocopier, so that I can show it to Vera.

Now here are some copies of my father’s poems and letters to her, including the letter setting out the details of his savings and pensions-both the original Ukrainian texts and the translations have been photocopied and stapled together. Why? For whom? Here is a letter to my father from the consultant psychiatrist at the Peterborough District Hospital, offering him an appointment. The appointment is for tomorrow. My father has not said anything about this. Did he receive the letter? She has copied the letter (why?) but she has not returned the original.

There are some letters from Ukraine, presumably from her husband, but I can only read Ukrainian character by character, and I haven’t got time to read them now.

There is more of my father’s correspondence-here is the letter from the trainee solicitor about the difficulty of obtaining an annulment. Here is a letter he has written to whom it may concern at the Home Office declaring his love for her, and insisting that the marriage is genuine. It is dated 10 April-shortly before the appeal panel in Nottingham. Was it also written under duress? Here is a letter from his GP, Doctor Figges, advising him that he needs to call in for a new prescription.

In a brown envelope I find some copies of the wedding pictures-Valentina smiling to camera, bent low towards my father so that her fabulous cleavage is revealed, and my father wide-eyed, grinning like a dog with two tails. In the same envelope are a copy of the marriage certificate and an information sheet from the Home Office regarding naturalisation.

Now here at last is the letter I have been looking for-it is a letter from Valentina’s solicitor, dated only a week ago, agreeing to act for her in relation to her Immigration Tribunal, hearing in London on 9 September and advising her to apply for legal aid. September! My father will never be able to hold out so long. The letter ends with a caution:

You are advised that you should avoid at all costs giving your husband grounds for divorce, as this could seriously jeopardise your case…