Loyal. Is that really what he thinks of her? It’s true that she has stayed with him. That she held on in the immediate wake of the storm that blew the roof off their marriage, until the days turned to years, birthdays and anniversaries passing so quickly she hardly noticed the time. But sharing a home, sharing a life, taking an interest in the other person, looking out for them – it isn’t everything. It doesn’t tell the full story. For the truth is she has been waiting, all these years, keeping things ticking over, until the day would come. And now that day is almost upon them, it makes her wonder at his use of that word. Loyal. Spoken innocently enough, but the way he had held her gaze made her distrust it.

‘They’re here,’ he calls, from inside the kitchen.

She puts these thoughts aside and goes in to greet them.

‘So, come on, then, tell us,’ Jake says. ‘What actually happened?’

It is late in the afternoon. The food has been eaten, the plates cleared away, and Greg has gone into the kitchen to fetch another bottle of wine from the fridge. In the grass nearby, the little boy lies on his tummy, building up a mound of earth and stones – a bug hotel, he calls it. He’s banging it now with a trowel he’s alighted upon, savagely beating down the earth, sending little flecks of muck flying. Mona lies in the shade of the tree, half watching the boy with wary interest.

‘What do you mean?’ Hilary asks, smiling politely, but she knows full well what he means.

‘Anton and his wife. I have to know. Is it true he stabbed her in the kitchen?’

‘Yes. It’s true,’ she says, draining the end of her glass just as Greg emerges from the house with the fresh bottle.

‘But why?’

She shrugs, unease cutting through the soporific effects of the food, the wine, the heat from the sun.

‘But you knew them, right? You were living there at the time it happened, so you must have had some idea, surely.’

Wine has loosened Jake’s tongue. When he first came in and sat down he had been all nervous affability. After the food and the wine, which he has been quickly imbibing, he slipped down in his chair, his grin has grown wider, his talk looser and more confident. He’s wearing long khaki shorts and a T-shirt emblazoned with a still from the movie Jaws. Hilary glances down, notes the tiny blond hairs furring his legs, glinting in the late-afternoon sun.

‘Actually,’ Greg says, ‘we’d just moved out of the flat when Charlotte … when it happened.’

‘Oh?’

‘A few days before, if I remember correctly.’