‘She did a good job of it. She must have had someone to help her. The theory we’re working with is that she initially hid the body and then came back with her sister and the tools needed to dig a shallow grave. Not even the foxes had found it by the time we got there. That might have been when she found your shoes and your purse, and decided to use them to scare you off …’

I frown before speaking for the first time in at least an hour. ‘But even I noticed the ground had been disturbed – surely when you followed up on that …’

Oscar looks away.

‘You didn’t even look, did you?’

He sniffs, refusing to meet my eye, ‘I should have done. I’m sorry.’

There is so much I could say but what good will it do now? Instead, I fix my gaze away from him in combative silence.

‘Issy, come on, you can hardly blame me. Do you know how many insane phone calls I’ve had from you in the past year? How many madcap theories you’ve tried to embroil me in, one way or another? Even after what you did to me? Besides, there was nothing to go on. But you wouldn’t hear it. What the hell was I supposed to do?’

‘Nothing to go on? You didn’t fucking look!’

This time it is his voice that grows louder. ‘Seriously, I’m sorry if I sound like a prick, but it’s been really tiring tiptoeing around you all the time … I know you’ve been through a lot and I’m sorry, I’m so sorry about Jess – but you can’t behave the way you’ve been behaving and expect to be treated … Anyway, you fucked me over, Is! Do you have any idea how much you hurt me? Do you have any idea how hard it was to lose you like that, and then, just as I was starting to move on with my life, to have to watch that happen to you, and not be able to be there?’

He stops, breathing in hard. Both of us are silent for at least a minute before he speaks again. And when he does, the strength of my enduring love for him, even after all these years, nearly topples me.

‘I’m sorry, Is. I wish I had listened to you earlier.’

‘Yeah, well, it probably would have been better if you hadn’t at all.’

‘You did the right thing,’ he says, and I laugh bitterly.

‘Getting a girl arrested for murder because she defended herself against a man who had trafficked her? That’s what you think happened, right? I don’t call that the right thing.’

‘Her situation will be taken into account. Her baby …’