My hands were shaking as I removed them from the wheel which I’d been clutching. Had I been mad all along, and had Michael been right? Did I deliberately smash his mother’s antique bowl? He even showed me the pieces on the floor: told me I’d stepped over them for two days. He said the same of Imo and Ned, that they’d taken things of his. A watch, belonging to Michael’s father. The family Bible. Stolen them. He punished them for it, and then we’d found those things later, locked in drawers. It made me feel better, remembering the children’s experiences. My parents, too, who he said never thanked us when they came to our house, although my mother always wrote – Michael had made it plain he didn’t count a phone call. But Michael destroyed the letters. Before I got to them. So they stopped coming, my parents. To make it easier for me.

Turner couldn’t have known, of course, what he was doing, by going down that misremembering route. But by God he’d hit some buttons. Found some raw nerves. I waited for my heart rate to come down a bit. Waited for it to stop racing. And I made myself relax my shoulders. Breathe, Lucy. Breathe.

I put the car into gear again and drove on. But I kept my speed very slow. Because I wasn’t entirely sure I was all right. Wasn’t entirely sure how to deal with what had happened back there at the station. Of course, I should have been leaping for joy. Not only had I confessed, but it had been rebuffed. Ruled out. The police weren’t having it. They had their man, thank you very much, and they’d been after him for a while. No wonder they’d left questioning me to the provincial branch – no neurotic housewife with a fit of conscience was going to get in the way of the Met. Retract him from their clutches. A nasty piece of work, I told myself. Parks, not Andrew. A drug dealer. A violent criminal. Who assaulted old ladies. Killed old ladies.