I heard the next day he had given her an almighty stab to the temple with a slender knife, which he left protruding from her head. It came as a surprise to me when the police officer, whose name was Schuster, told me what had happened and asked what I knew.

I told him: I awoke to a sound; awoke out of a clear dream, in which I had called in on two old friends who’d moved away with their wives. I was sad in the dream, because I had nothing to say to my old friends.

“So, Officer, did they have a family?” I asked.

“Who?” he answered.

“The man. The man who killed her, and the woman. Do they have a family, or did they?”

“Let us continue, Mr Gallagher.”

So, I awoke to the sound. I did not need to go to the toilet; I would take a sip from my water and go back to sleep. My body was not accustomed to being awake nor had it moved much, and in this circumstance I can normally fall back asleep with little effort; but sometimes I will think about matters that I cannot solve, just for one part of me to annoy the other part of me.

I told Officer Schuster that I had heard them fight bilingually:

They said things like you fucking shit, get out of my house, you spoilt little cow, you fat trollop, and the German, of which I could only decipher bits and pieces.

What would I say if I had to say something to these people? I wondered. Would I be calm, judgmental, or forthright? Maybe I would be calm, as he did not sound small. He sounded big and muscular, as though he had a barrelled chest – maybe he was a wrestler – made to look Russian – and a bald head and moustache in the shape of a brace bracket turned face-down. But what would the woman look like? I constructed her: timid, light, and yet relatively unafraid of him. She loved tennis. When she was younger she would go to Dortmund with her brother to visit grandparents who had a tennis court at the bottom of a garden that had many levels. They would jettison their rackets ahead and roll down the hills and stop just short of a gravel track: at night they would listen to the old man read short stories about battles on the seas and about majestic ballrooms with Kings and Queens dancing, fire breathers, and lost planets. Slippers would be worn and tea poured into pink-and-white china cups and truffles and a young child sitting against her Grandmother’s chair. And maybe that is why she was sent away for long periods, as her parents argued and then she would find herself under a quilt sucking her thumb with a worn, bright-blue blanket, but keeping silent; yet nearly breaking her thumb’s skin with her canines, and not moving; yet massaging the calves of her soft hairless legs against the other leg’s shin, and not seeing: just this image of torture in a room below playing out on her eyelids. While now this woman would have nice dark legs but knobbly nervous knees that I would see at the door, when I called to give out. She would have a pretty face, high cheeks, short dark hair, and when he answered the door she would sneak a look at me around his body, like he was a huge vertical drawbridge and she the princess.

I looked at Officer Schuster and said, “I thought at the time, What can be done? Anything?” and raised my arms.

Maybe the Germans are different? They could fight with more verbal ferocity but it could be physically benign. Maybe it is regular with this couple – the neighbours know and have accepted this; accepted because the family have had a hard time, a stillborn child, a recent tragedy, or a debilitating accident for one of them. I imagined arriving down and the door being answered by a guy in a wheelchair. I would say, “Keep it down, I am trying to get my seven hours, I don’t wish to change my alarm setting, I hate that jingle. Tough about your legs!” No, I was sure that it was an everyday occurrence, one that did not alarm the permanent neighbours. So I lay back.

“So they were not stopping,” I told Officer Schuster.

“What did you do then?” he asked me, even though he suspected, and rightly, that I did nothing, really.

“I went down to them.”

Schuster stopped feeling his chest through his shirt with his fingers.

I marched out of my apartment, keeping the door open by using a black umbrella, in my fairly worn boxer shorts and white t-shirt, and shouted down to them, “Hello! Hello!”

“I got no response,” I told Schuster.

I dared to go down to the bottom of the narrow and dimly lit staircase. My feet were arched like in starting blocks, with my toes pointed upward and the balls of my feet set against the steel ledge of the step; giving me friction to take off.

“I shouted again, ‘Will you please keep it down!’” I told Officer Schuster.

Jack Layden lives in Dublin