It jolted something within her, and she started up the steps, but Martin Cooper caught hold of her and drew her back.

‘Don’t, love. It’s a bloodbath in there.’

The words made Hilary start, like she’d been slapped.

‘But …’ she began, craning past Martin to look up at the open door, wanting Anton to come out – needing to set eyes on him for some kind of reassurance.

‘You must be patient,’ he had told her only the previous night. ‘We will find a way.’

Was this what he’d meant?

He didn’t appear, and her thoughts beat around her head, like a frightened pigeon trapped in a room, and the more she turned the idea over in her head, the more real it became. He had done this for her? For them? Had she known he would? Did this make her complicit? Bloodbath, Martin had said, and the violence of the act – the depravity of it – pushed her thoughts out of shape, as if her mind was melting and being rewelded into an unfamiliar shape. She thought of Anton wielding a knife – she envisaged the scene: Charlotte disbelieving right up until the last, the awful plunge of the blade through flesh, the terror. Distantly, she heard Maria Bolton saying her name, and then the sun flashed brightly overhead, and the sky loomed. She heard the crack of her head meeting the pavement and then nothing.

A shiver goes through her now as she sits on her bed, remembering. Nineteen years ago, and still the memory has the power to reduce her to this. She wonders about Anton and whether he, too, is thinking back on that morning, his memories twisting and intertwining with hers. The morning that marked the start of their long period of waiting.

But Hilary has grown tired of waiting. Tired of staying away. Throughout the burning heat of the summer, she has watched and waited for Anton’s signal, the nod to set things in motion, and still it hasn’t come. Her letters to him have all gone unanswered and she is sick of writing, fed up of the written word and the hold it has over her life.

‘Enough,’ she tells herself, powered by a sudden impatience. Enough waiting. Something needs to be done.