The thin bloodied thread of her voice, winding through the dark of that night to its monstrous heart. The tears had stopped; this place was far beyond tears. “I gave them kisses, Emma and Jack. I said to them, ‘It’s OK. It’s OK. Mummy loves you so much. I’m coming. Wait for me; I’ll be there as soon as I can.’”

Maybe I should have made her say it. I couldn’t open my mouth. The humming was a fretsaw whining at my skull; if I moved, breathed, I would split into a thousand pieces. My mind was flailing for something else, anything. Dina. Quigley. Richie, white-faced.

“Pat was still on the kitchen floor. The knife was right there beside him. I picked it up and he turned around and I stuck it into his chest. He stood up and he went, ‘What … ?’ He was staring at his chest and he looked so amazed, like he couldn’t work out what had happened, he just couldn’t understand. I said, ‘Pat we have to go,’ and I did it again and then he grabbed me, my wrists, and we were fighting, all over the kitchen—he was trying not to hurt me, just hold me, but he was so much stronger and I was so scared he would get the knife away—I was kicking him, I was screaming, ‘Pat hurry we have to hurry …’ He was going, ‘Jenny Jenny Jenny’—he looked like Pat again, he was looking at me properly and it was terrible, why couldn’t he have looked at me like that before?”

O’Kelly. Geri. My father. I slid my eyes out of focus till Jenny was just a blur of white and gold. Her voice in my ears stayed mercilessly clear, that fine thread pulling me onwards, slicing deep.

“There was blood all over. It felt like he was getting weaker, but so was I—I was so tired … I went, ‘Please, Pat, please stop, we have to go find the kids, we can’t leave them alone there,’ and he just froze, stopped still in the middle of the floor and stared at me. I could hear us both breathing, these big ugly gasping noises. Pat said—his voice, Jesus, the sound in his voice—he went, ‘Oh, God. What did you do?’

“His hands had gone all loose on my wrists. I got away and I hit him with the knife again. He didn’t even notice. He started to head for the kitchen door, and then he fell over. He just fell. He was trying to crawl for a second, but he stopped.”

Jenny’s eyes shut for a second. So did mine. The one thing I had been hoping for Pat, the one thing that had been left to hope, was that he had never known about the children.

Jenny said, “I sat down beside him and I stuck the knife in my chest and then in my stomach, but it didn’t work—my hands were all, they were all slippy and I was shaking so hard and I wasn’t strong enough! I was crying and I tried my face and my throat and everywhere, but it was no good: my arms were like jelly. I couldn’t even sit up any more, I was lying on the floor, but I was still there. I … Oh, God.” The shudder galvanized her whole body. “I thought I was going to get stuck there. I thought the neighbors would have heard us fighting and called the cops, and an ambulance was going to come and … I’ve never been so frightened. Never. Never.”