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I tried not to be upset by my meeting with Charles Clover, but, standing on the platform at Woolwich Arsenal with a seven-minute wait for the next train, I couldn’t put it out of my mind. His accusations didn’t bother me too much. I mean, you hardly need a degree in moral philosophy to reach the conclusion that, all in all, it’s the right thing to report someone to the police for murder, particularly when they’ve also tried to kill you. But I did find it hard to get my head around his description of the murder of Alan Conway as a ‘reflex action’, something a child might have done. Was it as easy as that? All those thousands of books published every year about detectives, police investigations, suspects, clues, conspiracies … did they really hinge on something so banal? And what about that other remark of his? ‘ You might have done the same. ’ I couldn’t help wondering if it might not be true. Given the right circumstances, are we all potential killers? Was that the ultimate appeal of murder stories, that they reveal not just the facts of a particular crime but the truth about all of humanity, that civilisation and decency are only skin-deep and just beneath the surface we are all potentially monsters?

That was what had made Belmarsh so morbidly fascinating. There had been a whole crowd of prisoners in the room where I’d met Charles and all of them had been stripped of that outer layer, revealed for what they were. Sitting among them had been a disquieting experience. I thought of Charles at one of his dinner parties, standing there with a glass of Gavi – his favourite Italian wine – expounding on literary awards. Compare Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam (lightweight, it won the Booker Prize) to Atonement (a masterpiece, shortlisted, it didn’t). The Booker vs the Costa. The virtues of the Women’s Prize for Fiction. And then the Charles Clover I had just met, sullen, angry, biting into his Double Decker. It was almost impossible to accept that the two men were the same. What had separated them? Was it what they had done? Or was it being found out?

My mobile rang. I looked at the screen and saw that it was Elaine. I didn’t want to speak to her. I didn’t feel I was ready. But it would be unfair to ignore her and I still had five minutes until the train arrived. I answered.

‘Susan? Where are you?’ She knew I had come out of the prison. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to answer the phone.

‘I’m at the station,’ I told her.

‘Did you see him? How was he?’

I searched for the right words. ‘It wasn’t easy, Elaine. To be honest, I don’t know why he agreed to see me. He hates me. I suppose I can’t blame him. He thinks I was wrong to turn him in, that I should have covered up for him.’

‘That’s understandable.’

‘You don’t think that, though?’

‘I think it must have been a very difficult decision for you. But you had to do what you thought was right.’

It hadn’t been a difficult decision at all – but I couldn’t tell her that.

‘I did warn you,’ she went on. ‘He gets very depressed. More than that. Sometimes he thinks he’ll never get out of there, and it is such a dreadful place.’

‘He wants the police to arrest me.’

‘That’s not going to happen.’ Elaine almost scolded me, as if what I’d just said was ridiculous. ‘Charles wasn’t happy when I asked him to see you, but I persuaded him to help you because we all owe it to Eliot. I’m sorry, Susan. Didn’t he tell you anything?’

‘There was some new information he gave me. The trouble is, I’m not sure how it’s going to help.’

Four minutes until my train arrived. I just wanted to be on my way.

I heard a doorbell ring at the other end of the line. ‘There’s someone here,’ Elaine said, lowering her voice. ‘I have to go.’

‘Yes. My train’s just pulling in.’

‘Let me know if there’s anything else I can do. Call me any time.’

The line went dead.

*

The journey back to Crouch End felt endless, crossing the whole of London and changing trains twice. Then there was the walk down the hill from Highgate station with the afternoon sun and no hint of a breeze. I got to the house just after five o’clock. I let myself in through the front door. There was an Amazon package lying on the mat – a book, I guessed from the shape. Why did I notice it? Why did I even think about it when, in the same glance, I saw what had happened while I had been away?

Someone had broken in. The flat had been trashed.

It took me several seconds to work out what I was seeing and for the images to make any sort of sense in my head. It took me longer to persuade myself to step forward and cross the threshold. My first thought was that I had been burgled, that I had become just another London statistic to be ignored by the police. Then I realised that it was something much worse.

Everything that was of any value to me had been deliberately smashed, ripped apart, soiled, cut to pieces. The kitchen and the living room were unrecognisable. Someone had blocked the sink and turned the taps on full so that the water had overflowed all over the floor and there were white polyurethane clouds floating on the surface. The same person had taken a kitchen knife to my cushions and sofas, giving the impression of a devastated miniature landscape. I saw pages ripped out of my books, sodden and hopeless, and these hurt me most. Insurance would pay for the damage, but whoever had done this had known how to make it personal. They had taken special care with my photographs. The frames were mangled, the glass in pieces, the images torn up. Katie and the kids, Andreas, Crete, dinners, holidays … anything connected to my life had been mutilated beyond recognition. There was no way I would ever be able to wipe away the violence of what had been done.

In a daze, I drifted from room to room. The French windows were open, but I didn’t dare go into the garden, not yet. Part of me wondered if the intruder might still be outside. I was numb with sadness and shock. My drinks cupboard was empty, the wood kicked in, the contents of every bottle emptied. I continued to the rear of the flat, following a trail of what looked like dark red ink that had been splattered onto the carpet. The bathroom door was open. Looking in, the first thing I noticed was that the mirror above the sink had been smashed. Then I saw the weapon that had been used. It was the one award that I’d hung on to, which had travelled to Crete and back: British Book Awards, Editor of the Year. It was a heavy thing and it had been used as a hammer against the glass and then thrown into the toilet, cracking the porcelain.

I went into my bedroom. I barely noticed the bed linen in rags, the duvet cut open, the curtains pulled down, my make-up smeared, poured or thrown everywhere. My attention was drawn to the single word scrawled with a tube of my own lipstick on the (Little Greene Loft White) wall opposite me.

KILLER

Somebody thought I had killed Eliot Crace and they had taken revenge on his behalf. I couldn’t think of any other reason for this. How had they got in? Nobody had keys except for me. Then I remembered the rickety back door leading into the garden from the street and the French windows open downstairs. I’d meant to buy a surveillance system when I moved in. I could have bought a camera off the net for fifty quid. But this was Crouch End. It hadn’t felt like a priority. Well, I was paying for it now.

The red marks I had noticed on the carpet continued under the bed and suddenly, as if I’d been electrocuted, I knew what they were.

Blood.

Hugo hadn’t been waiting for me when I came in and I knew with absolute certainty that he had been stabbed in the living room or the kitchen and that he had made his way back here to die. I burst into tears. I’d managed to persuade myself that I didn’t like the cat very much, that he somehow represented a style of life I wanted to avoid, but there’s something about animals: cats and dogs. They’ve learned how to make themselves indispensable and the thought that he’d been here on his own when someone broke in and that he had become another object of their fury was too much to bear. I knew he was under the bed but I couldn’t bring myself to look. I just stood there and cried.

And then I heard a whimper, so faint as to be almost inaudible. I dropped to my knees and saw him curled up in a ball, lying on a carpet stained red by his own blood. But still alive. He saw me and yowled pitifully, as if blaming me for not being there when this had happened. His eyes were bright with pain. Very slowly, I reached out and pulled him towards me, cupping him in my hands, trying not to hurt him any more than he had been hurt already. He didn’t try to resist. He cleared the edge of the bed and I swept him up in my arms, certain that he could not live much longer. His fur concealed most of the stab wound in his side, but from the amount of blood lost, I could tell that it was deep and had happened a while ago.

Right then, everything else was forgotten. I was determined to save him. Holding him against my chest, I half ran, half stumbled into the kitchen and laid him down on the counter. He didn’t move. He was barely breathing. I opened the fridge. All the food – eggs, milk, yoghurt, vegetables – had been scooped out and thrown on the floor but there was still ice in the freezer. I grabbed a tea towel, filled it with ice cubes and wrapped it round the cat. I looked for my car keys, remembered I no longer had a car, then picked up Hugo and ran out of the house.

There were several vets in Crouch End, but the nearest one was half a mile away – fortunately, downhill. I ran the whole way, Hugo now moaning as he reacted to the stress of the journey. It was a choice between moving fast or moving carefully and I was certain the poor creature would stop breathing at any moment. With every step, I was cursing the police for impounding my MG – irrational, but my grief and fury needed a target. I reached the Clock Tower in the middle of the village. Twenty past five. I would never be able to see the clockface in the same way again. There were still a few shoppers around and they looked at me in horror as I ran into the road, swerving through the traffic. A madwoman with a half-dead cat. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw a bus bearing down on me and I thought it might even be a welcome end to this whole experience if I was run down and killed.

But I reached the other side of the road and continued past a row of shops until I came to a veterinary surgeon I’d walked past a hundred times but had never thought I’d need. I barged in. There were three people sitting on plastic chairs surrounded by sacks of dog food and brightly coloured toys. I ignored them, running straight to the receptionist, a young woman talking on the phone.

‘Please, you’ve got to help me,’ I gasped. ‘My cat has been stabbed.’

To her credit, she reacted instantly, putting down the phone mid-sentence and rushing to a door at the back of the surgery. I heard her call someone and, seconds later, she came back with a man dressed in blue scrubs. He was young, bearded, immediately professional. He took the cat from me. ‘When did this happen?’

‘I don’t know. I just got home.’

‘Do you have any idea who did this?’

‘No …’

He had already given the wound a cursory examination. ‘This is bad. But maybe not as bad as it looks. Please, take a seat …’ He took the cat and disappeared the way he had come.

The other pet owners were looking at me in alarm. I’d jumped the queue but nobody complained. The receptionist asked me if I wanted some tea and I nodded. I was feeling very cold and I was shaking. I kept trying to tell myself that it was just a cat and that I didn’t even want it, but that wasn’t how I felt. About fifteen minutes later, the vet reappeared.

‘He’s going to be OK,’ he said. ‘It’s a serious abdominal wound, but you did the right thing putting an icepack on him and getting him here quickly. He was lucky. He’s been stabbed, but the blade missed the neck and the thorax and it didn’t hit any major blood vessels.’

‘He’s lost a lot of blood,’ I said.

‘Yes. We’re giving him a blood transfusion, but if he was going to die, it would have been hypovolemic shock that killed him. And that would already have happened. My colleague is with him now and we’ll stitch the wound. He may have to stay in a couple of nights – we’ll keep an eye on him. Are you registered here?’

‘No. I haven’t had him very long.’

‘Is he insured?’

‘I don’t know …’ I suddenly couldn’t remember if I’d insured him or not. I knew I’d meant to.

‘Well, I should warn you that you could be looking at several hundred pounds …’

‘The cost doesn’t matter.’

‘OK. Give Jocelyn your details and we’ll call you later this evening and tell you how he’s progressing. But I honestly don’t think you need to worry.’

I handed over my name, phone number, email and home address to the receptionist and left.

Walking back to my flat, I felt completely exhausted, and it didn’t help that this time it was uphill. I didn’t want to go back inside but I had no choice. I hadn’t even locked the door. I walked into the horrible mess that someone had made of my lovely flat and wondered what I should do. It seemed obvious that I should report this to the police, although, for obvious reasons, they were the last people I wanted to see. Also, I wasn’t sure what number to use. It wasn’t an emergency. What could I expect them to do?

And then I remembered. I found the card that Detective Inspector Blakeney had given me. He had written his private number on the back.

I called it.