‘Aren’t you freaked?’ Anna asks. ‘I mean, he murdered someone! Honestly, Hil, I admire your sangfroid, but even you must feel a little twinge. After all, you knew the woman, right? Weren’t you friends with her?’

‘I wouldn’t go so far as to call us friends. But we were … friendly.’ She says this lightly, but feels the heaviness of the words in her heart. ‘She was our landlady for a little while. When the work was being done on our house, before we could move in, we rented the basement flat beneath their house. Just for a couple of months.’

‘So, were you guys living there when it happened?’

‘No, no. We’d moved out at that stage,’ Hilary says, making it sound like they were long gone when, really, they were barely out of the door.

‘What was he like, though?’ Claire asks, a hungry look entering her eye. Hilary has seen it before, inwardly recoils from it. ‘Had you any inkling at all of what he was capable of?’

‘No, of course not.’ She laughs, but it sounds forced and she’s aware of Evelyn watching her from across the table. ‘I hardly knew him, really,’ she adds, a twist in her gut at this denial. ‘He was always polite to me. Well-mannered.’

Anna shakes her head. ‘That poor woman. God love her. Had she any idea of what was in store for her?’

Poor woman, Hilary thinks, the words curdling inside her. Not words she would ever have associated with Charlotte. And then it comes at her without warning: a flash of memory. Coming up from the past, the sound of banging on glass. Charlotte with her fox-red hair, wearing a green sun-dress, spaghetti straps carving tracks through her shoulders, standing on the patio. Breasts, not large but shapely – you couldn’t miss them under the stretch-cotton. The little boy in tears by her side – Charlotte clutching his wrist and quivering with rage. Greg, inside, calling: ‘Hil? What is it?’

A shiver passes through her despite the heat of the restaurant. She realizes she’s drifted into silence, the others staring at her, awaiting her response.

‘Who knows what she knew?’ Hilary says, her voice dry and scratchy in her throat. ‘The things that go on inside a marriage – can you ever really tell when you’re outside looking in?’

‘That’s certainly true,’ Anna agrees, with feeling.

‘And I think he was misrepresented in the press at the time,’ Hilary goes on, a little recklessly. ‘Making him out to be some sort of monster. He really was a very nice man. Always very charming.’

‘Hmm. They’re usually the ones you have to watch,’ Claire replies.

‘Don’t they say,’ Anna adds, ‘that nine times out of ten, when a woman is murdered it’s her husband or partner that’s the guilty party?’

‘That’s right,’ Claire agrees. ‘You’re absolutely right.’