As soon as she said the words she realised how inappropriate they sounded and she quickly backtracked. ‘I’m sure she didn’t mean any harm, though.’

‘It’s OK,’ said Caroline. ‘It’s probably best you hear it from me anyway.’ She sighed again and there was a long pause before she continued. ‘It’s… for murder… my sentence… it’s murder. But I expect you guessed that anyway.’

‘Kind of, I suppose,’ answered Adele, ‘although I didn’t know what to think really—’

Caroline quickly cut in as though she wanted to get this thing out of the way now that she had started. ‘It was my husband.’

She looked up at Adele, seeking her approval before continuing. Adele nodded, and Caroline dropped her gaze to her lap.

‘He’d been abusing me for years,’ she said, as she continued to fidget with the bedcover, no longer able to meet Adele’s eyes. ‘I know,’ she added, pre-empting Adele’s response, ‘I should have left him. That’s what everyone says. But until you’ve been in that situation, you don’t know. It happens gradually, over months or years. And you just get pulled along with it.

‘It was his way of dealing with stress, unfortunately. A raised voice here, a slammed door there, if someone had upset him at work. Then sometimes he went too far and lashed out at me if I said a wrong word or even if I said something unintentional. He always took it the wrong way and it was difficult to calm him down, to make him see that I was on his side. Then, as time went on, his rages got worse.

‘I suppose part of me wanted the man I married to come back. We were blissfully happy at first, and I wanted to relive those times so much… And there were still flashes of his old self from time to time, even at the end. That’s what kept me going, I suppose, the thought that the man I loved would return to me.

‘I used to make excuses for him, telling myself that it was because of the stress he was under, and that once things improved for him at work he’d go back to being his old self again. But as the years went by it was as though I didn’t recognise him anymore. He changed so much.’

Her voice was now trembling and she looked at Adele again.

‘It’s OK, you don’t have to,’ said Adele. ‘Not if it’s too painful.’

‘No, you need to hear it. Sooner or later someone will tell you and I’d rather you heard it from me.’

‘OK, if you’re sure,’ said Adele.