The event that changed all of their lives happened on a Saturday afternoon in June, just minutes after Michael Turner - thinking the Nelsons' house was empty - stepped through their back door. Although it was early in the month, London was blistered under a heatwave. All along South Hill Drive windows hung open, the cars parked on either side hot to the touch, their seams ticking in the sun. A morning breeze had ebbed, leaving the sycamores lining the street motionless. The oaks and beeches on the surrounding Heath were also still. The heatwave was only a week old, but already the taller grass beyond the shade of these trees was bleaching blonde. Michael had found the Nelsons' back door unlocked and ajar. Resting his forearm against its frame he'd leant into the gap and called out for his neighbours.

"Josh? Samantha?"

There was no reply. The house absorbed his voice without an echo. He looked down at his old pair of deck shoes, their soles thick with freshly watered soil. He'd been gardening since lunchtime and had come straight over to the Nelsons' without washing. His knees, showing from under his shorts, were also smudged with dirt. Hooking the heel of his left shoe under the toe of his right, Michael pulled it off. As he did the same with the other, he listened for signs of life inside the house. Again, there was nothing. He looked at his watch - it was twenty past three. He had a fencing lesson on the other side of the Heath at four. It would take him at least half an hour to walk here. He went to push the door wider, but on seeing the soil on his hands, nudged it open with his elbow instead, then stepped inside.

The kitchen was cool and dark and Michael had to pause for a moment to allow the sunlight to dissolve from his vision. Behind him his neighbours' garden sloped away between a pear tree and a shrunken herbaceous border. The parched lawn tapered to a wooden fence shot through with reeds. Beyond this fence a weeping willow bowed to one of the ponds on the Heath. In the last month these ponds had grown a skin of green duckweed, surprising in its brightness. Just a few minutes earlier, while resting on his heels, Michael had watched a coot as she'd cut her way through it on the far side, her nun's head pumping her forward, a cover of chicks criss-crossing over her wake.

I Saw a Man, Owen Sheers