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by.
    His work as a property developer fascinated me for a start. I’m an uncashed-up and unfulfilled real estate junkie, who wastes far too much of my time watching crap housing renovation shows, one after the other, and dreaming of that place in Spain with the veranda and one of those pools that merge into the horizon so it looks like you can swim in the sky. That said, I hadn’t even managed to re-do the bathroom of my flat in all the years I’d lived there. Hence I was very impressed with Jeremy, who owned seven flats around London, and had two renovation projects on the go and three full-time employees.
    ‘How do you manage getting workmen to turn up?’ I asked him, drawing on my sofa-based knowledge.
    ‘There are ways,’ he said. ‘Chocolate digestives work a treat.’
    His relationship with Amanda had clearly been passionate , although he didn’t speak about her much, except to say she was wonderful and he’d do anything to protect her. This was why he’d refused visits – to protect her from this place.
    His hobbies included cycling, running, Thai cooking, reading (he could never get through a James Joyce, like me), watching movies (his favourite, like mine, was The Shawshank Redemption ).
    And his childhood had been heart-wrenchingly terrible.
    When I asked him about growing up, his head dropped down and swayed from left to right a little. After a moment, he attempted to say something.
    ‘What was that?’ I hadn’t deciphered his mumble.
    ‘I, um …’ he whimpered, head still down and shaking.
    ‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
    He dragged his head upwards, lips quivering, let out a deep breath, then looked at me.
    ‘When I was four, I did something really terrible. It’s why I’m in here, it’s what they have on me, a history of violence, because I tried to stop my sister from crying and I … I accidentally killed her, when I was four.’
    I was used to people telling me private stuff – stuff they’d never told anyone and were surprised to be telling me. I think I have the right kind of face, or ask the right questions anyway. I’m always being told things out of the blue – I stole my mum’s television, or I punched my husband, or I slept with Giuseppe from the gym, or I have a terrible itchy genital disease – but this topped anything I’d ever been told before and I didn’t quite know how to react. What did you say to someone who’d killed his baby sister? ‘Tell me, how did it feel to murder your sister?’
    My mind was reeling. I was aware I’d relinquished my blank, non-judgemental social-work face and instead had a horror-stricken open-mouthed one that screamed JESUS CHRIST, YOU DID WHAT?
    He broke down and cried onto the cold desk between us, and I felt like crying too. It was too awful, what he’d done. His little sister was gone. And he’d paid for it ever since.
    Before I could decide on how to respond to his tears, he managed to compose himself, thank me, ask me to please come and see him again, and then leave the room. If he hadn’t done this, I think I’d have sat there for ever not knowing what to say, looking at his head rocking in his hands. The man I was visiting had accidentally killed ababy, destroying the lives of everyone he loved, and his own life too, when he was four years old – only a tiny bit older than my little Robbie.
    Gathering my notes after he left the room, I realised I’d only written a few lines:
    Name: Jeremy Bagshaw
Date of birth: 21/7/1976
Address: 67 Station Street, Islington, London
Currently on remand in HMP Sandhill, Glasgow
Charge: Murder

10
    Chas assured me everything was hunky-dory at home, so I left work with my colleagues and we went off to a West End pub to celebrate my first day in the job.
    I’d been marvelling at Danny all day, watching his every move. He dressed immaculately, seemed more confident and at ease than anyone I knew, and was the funniest bastard I’d ever met.
    In the taxi, he told me he’d written a social