He doesn’t want to tell her about his years in a cell although he knows he should – that she will find out in the end. In the park, when he’d suggested the nocturnes, he’d seen the flash of fear in her eyes and, for one horrible moment, he’d felt sure she’d discovered the truth about his past. But now, watching as she steps towards the mantelpiece, raising a hand to touch the candle-holders – Waterford Crystal, dull with dust – he realizes she doesn’t know anything of what happened. For the time being, he is safe.

‘My wife’s,’ he explains. ‘She was quite a fan.’

He’d bought them for Charlotte – he cannot remember the occasion. A birthday or anniversary, or a gift to say he was sorry.

Behind Leah, in a corner of the room, a glass-fronted cabinet displays the collection of cut glass – the decanters and glasses, the jugs and bowls. Some he’d won in golf tournaments; others had been wedding gifts. He watches Leah studying them now.

‘They remind me of home,’ she says.

‘Oh?’

‘My mother shares your wife’s taste.’

‘And where is home?’

She tells him, and he nods, picturing the small midlands town with its single main street dotted with pubs and betting shops, a church rising severely at one end. One of those depressingly grim places where everyone knows everyone else’s business; a place you’d drive through with a groan of relief that you didn’t have to live there.

‘When did you leave?’ he asks.

He is surprised when she says: ‘I was fifteen. I moved up to Dublin. The schools were better here. I lived with my aunt.’

Something in the way she says it makes him study her closely – her answer feels too practised. And he cannot help but think of his own children. Like Leah, shipped out to an aunt to be brought up. The thought is painful and he pushes it aside.

‘And your family?’

‘My parents are still there. My father retired some years back – his health’s not great. My mother is still active, though. She helps out in the local nursing home, a member of the bridge club, that kind of thing.’

‘Brothers and sisters?’

‘No. Just me.’

‘An only child, like myself.’

He might have guessed as much. Something in her solitary nature. The quietness she carries around with her. A beloved only child.

He wonders at how they let her go so young. What was it that drove her away? ‘It must have been hard for them, losing you at that age.’

She shrugs, rubs her arms again, this time more vigorously. A nerve touched, he can tell.