Marcus’s hands were tight on the wheel. “She stormed off. I let her go. Then I changed my mind. I went downstairs. I heard you. I heard you and David. I was just this mug, not just to you, but to all of you. After that I don’t know. It was black as pitch, like a nightmare. I was looking for her … blundering around all those rooms.” Marcus turned to me. His eyes were still that hardwood brown. “I heard the front door click. I couldn’t find a pair of boots that fit. By the time I got them on, she was halfway down the drive.”

He shook his head like a man trying to free himself from a dream. “I caught her up. I got hold of her arm. She said to let go. She said it was too late. She said it was over. And I hit her. Just once. She went down and smacked her head. She was lying very still. It was so quiet. They said it wasn’t immediate, but Christ she seemed dead to me. Floppy. All the heat leaving her. It was like, I just couldn’t take it in. I … I literally tiptoed away. I went back to bed and got under the covers and went straight to sleep. Like a child who thinks when they wake up, it won’t have happened. Didn’t sleep another night after for years. And now again. I can’t sleep. Can’t work.”

“Why didn’t you tell? It was an accident.”

Marcus frowned. “No. I hit her. It wasn’t an accident. I lost control. Just for a second, and then I ran away and left her there. I couldn’t tell anyone that. I couldn’t have my mum know I did that. I just couldn’t do it to her. Not after everything she’d been through with my old man. And Darren, you know what he was like. I’d have been dead to him. I want it over. I want it over. It’s like you always had this hold over me. Even now. It was your fault. This … this is your fault.”

“That’s what Joe used to say.”

Marcus wasn’t looking at me anymore, but staring out through the windscreen at a thick patch of brambles beneath a beech tree. Maybe he was thinking it would be a good spot to hide my body. A vein was popping in his temple.

Afterward I would wonder if what Marcus told me was just a dream he’d had that night at the manor, or in the years since. Guilt for having loved her, for not having saved her. But in the van, I believed him and I knew he meant me harm.