More than twelve hours after the moment he’d stepped into the burnt-out lock-up it was still there when he got home to the boat. He arrived at dawn; the mist gone, a wide barge carrying gravel slipping past on the river towards Cambridge. Laura made him shower in the narrowboat and bagged his clothes for the laundrette. She pushed her face into his black hair and said he smelt of lemon, and strawberries. But something lingered in his nose and throat, that sweetness, a ripeness. He drank orange juice and black coffee, ate toast with marmite; tasted the malty meatiness, then left the rest. ‘You OK?’ she asked. They were sitting on deck. He’d been looking out over the fen for twenty minutes without saying a word. ‘They said three dead on the radio?’ ‘I found them,’ he said. ‘It was as if they’d been in a furnace.’ ‘Take a day off. Sleep, you’re out on your feet, Philip.’ She had a script on her knee and she flicked through the pages, pretending not to care if he took her advice.
