It was summer, so there was a tinge of light through the slats in the blinds even though it wasn’t yet six a.m. Hilary doesn’t know what it was that woke her. There was no siren blaring. She cannot recall any blue flashing lights. Intuition, perhaps. A deep knowledge of something catastrophic about to happen. At first, she had felt confusion – the unfamiliarity of the room around her, the foreign smell of new carpets and fresh paint. Then she heard the bang of a car door, followed by another, and by the time she was out of bed, struggling into her dressing-gown, he was already coming out of the front door of his house, flanked on either side by uniformed officers. How clearly she can remember the way the guard shielded Anton’s head as he ducked in through the car door, and the pang it caused deep in her chest, remembering how she had run her own hands through his hair, how she had felt the hard mass of his skull beneath her fingertips when she had kissed him. And yet there she was, staring at the back of his head through the window of a patrol car, watching helplessly as they sped away with him.

‘Where do you think they’ve taken him?’ she had asked Greg, over breakfast, a couple of hours later. A Monday morning, Greg dressed for summer school. She’d tried to keep her tone casual, as if she didn’t really care one way or the other. As if it wasn’t eating her up inside.

‘I imagine he’s being interviewed in the local station,’ he’d said, scooping out a piece of melon and eating it at the counter.

She tried to imagine the scene – Anton at a table in a windowless room, two slab-faced interrogators opposite, a mirror on the wall screening off the others who were watching.

‘Are you really going to work?’ she asked, as Greg wiped his face with a napkin, and reached for his briefcase on the table. It exasperated her, the knowledge that he could just carry on as normal while Anton was being interrogated by the police.

‘Why wouldn’t I?’

‘What if the police want to speak to you?’

‘Then give them the school’s number. Although I can’t think what else they’d want from me.’

They had both given statements the day before. Everyone who’d been at the party – all the neighbours – had been questioned.

‘I wish you’d stay at home,’ she pleaded. ‘I just feel so nervous. What if they call around here again? What should I tell them?’

‘Tell them the truth,’ he’d said simply, then kissed her cheek and left her to stew in her own tormented thoughts.