‘That nice policeman told me.’ She shook her head sorrowfully. ‘Seb was so angry after I’d appeared on telly that day, kept ranting about people out to get him, and you sticking your nose in – but I didn’t take him seriously.’ She fiddled with a tassel on her dress. ‘He insisted on giving me a lift when I brought you the crash photos. I’d given him the address so he could look it up beforehand. Oh God –’ She caught her bottom lip with two pearly top teeth. ‘I’m so sorry, Maggie.’

‘It’s not your fault, Fay.’ I abandoned my foul tea. ‘I guess he loved you very much.’

She toyed with her mince pie. ‘I think he loved you too. He just had such a distorted view of it all. Poor Troy.’

‘Why, though?’ I felt the anger rise again. ‘Why was he so messed up?’

‘He had a very odd image of women generally. I was so in love with him, it took me a long time to realise it,’ she said sadly. ‘He invited us both to the film premiere, you know, though I didn’t realise it was him then. Perhaps he was hoping I’d see you with him and be insanely jealous.’

I looked at her. ‘Would you have been?’

She walked to the table in the window, flicked nervously through a Country Life magazine. ‘Probably. I knew he was wrong for me, but I loved him so much.’ Her eyes filled with tears and I thought of my love for Alex despite all the pain we’d been through, and I felt an enormous bolt of sorrow for the mess we were all in. ‘So much, Maggie. That’s why I put up with it for so long.’

‘I understand that, Fay,’ I said quietly. ‘I do, really.’

‘But I do think Troy really fell for you, Maggie.’ She was trying to be generous. ‘The only other time I spoke to him he told me he’d met someone really special, and I believed him. I was kind of relieved, but it still hurt.’ She looked at me now. ‘I just didn’t realise it was you.’

And this was where my mind hit a wall. The sheer intimacy I’d shared with Seb, the sex, the eventual protestation of love. The fact that all those terrible things he’d done, he’d done after we’d been to bed together. He’d crept downstairs and painted abuse on the wall, he’d crept out and slashed his own tyres. He’d texted me even when we were at dinner together; he’d smashed up my flat and then casually joined me at Heathrow for a weekend in Cornwall. And he must have planted the phone in the box of stuff I’d returned to Alex, trying to frame him.