‘She knew about Mary Carrington, the woman who had slipped and drowned in the bath. And she knew about you. She’d done her research.’

‘Mr Hawthorne, this is really—’

‘She knew that your son had committed suicide at university.’

‘My son was an addict. I don’t know why you have to bring this up now. It’s really very cruel of you. I was forced to explain myself in front of a hundred complete strangers. He took an overdose and he died.’

‘Was he a drug addict?’ Hawthorne asked.

Anne didn’t reply.

‘That was the natural inference and I think it’s what you wanted us to believe. A drug addict takes a drug overdose and he dies. But there are other sorts of addicts.’

I will never forget the pause that followed. It seemed to stitch itself into the very air.

‘Gambling addicts, for example.’

That was when Anne Cleary knew it was all over.

‘Internet gambling is a horrible thing,’ Hawthorne went on, and for once he sounded genuinely sympathetic. ‘Your son was one of around three hundred thousand addicts in the country. There are about five hundred deaths a year and most of them are young men, university students, kids living alone. And the big online gambling companies . . . they know what they’re doing with those bright lights and flashing colours, the personalised texts and emails, the free bets. You must have been sickened when you got an invitation to a literary festival sponsored by Spin-the-wheel.com. I assume they were the same people who killed William.’

Everything in the room had changed. It was like an image on a computer screen that had suddenly frozen. It all looked the same, but I was aware that something had gone terribly wrong.