‘And nothing! I paid for the shopping, and then when we were outside, I put him in the pram and by the time we got home he was calm. The same thing that happens every day of the week with women and babies, but the only reason people talked about it – the only reason they pounced on that one little thing – was because of what happened afterwards. I swear to you, Jake. I didn’t do it.’

‘So what happened to him, then?’

He’s giving her a flat stare, and she cannot tell how deep his suspicion goes. She’s aware of rain outside in the garden, the patter of it on the stone paving, foreign-sounding after weeks of drought. But all she can think about is the baby, the soft weight of him in her arms.

‘I don’t know,’ she says, in a small voice.

‘It says here the cause of death was a bleed to the brain.’

‘Yes.’

‘But you don’t know anything about that?’

She wavers and, for a moment, she is back in the police station of her hometown, facing a detective asking her the same question. Her father had been sitting alongside her, gently coaxing her to answer. And when the question had come, as she had known it would, Did you see Cian fall, or bang his head?, she had stumbled over her reply. The same reply she gives Jake now:

‘No.’ She has never said any different. Nor will she, ever.

Jake is silent. Leah can tell he is unsure of what to believe and wishes there was some way of reassuring him, of drawing him back to her, but he seems so distant, as if he’s speaking to her from behind a wall of glass. Instinctively, she has sealed herself off, allowed herself to be paralysed by fear.

Instead, she looks down at the paper once more. Two photographs accompany the article. The larger one shows Anton on the steps outside his house, half turned towards the camera, his expression caught in a grimace of irritation. An unflattering shot, something vaguely reptilian about the cast of his features, the slicked-back hair and suspicious gaze – nothing like the Anton she knows. The picture of Leah is blurry and out of focus, but the impression it gives is quite different. The diaphanous dress, the sunglasses, the way her hair is lifted around her face, caught in a sudden breeze – it depicts youth and beauty and a certain blitheness of spirit. She has no recollection of the photograph being taken. A distance shot, captured on camera by a photographer hidden across the road in the park. It must have happened as she was leaving for work one morning.