In the garden a few nights ago, he had leant over the railings, a whispered shout through the open French windows, trying to reach her where she sat, upright, on the sofa, listening. ‘It’s not true,’ he had said. ‘Whatever it is they’ve told you about me. Whatever they said I did. I am not a monster.’ He had waited and waited for her response, but there had been none.

He feels the time stretching out between them.

‘How are you getting on with them?’ Mark asks, watching as the man and boy wait on the kerb for her to catch up, then all three cross the road together.

‘I keep to myself,’ Anton replies.

She is lodged deep inside him, like a stone. These past days, he has become a shell of a man, moving around the ground-floor rooms, following the sounds that echo up from the basement. He has lingered in the back sitting room, holding himself steady while listening to her music. He has sat in the dark on the bottom step of the inner stairs, the trailing sounds of their voices coming to him, snatches of conversation, glimpses of a normal life that has eluded him.

‘Sure about that?’

In the early hours, Anton had awoken with tightness in his chest – pain like a hot hand clenched around his heart. A panic attack, but it had left him weepy and shaken. He had gone downstairs and lain on the floor beside the piano, pressed his ear to the gap in the floorboards. Fear had driven him there. All he wanted was to be close to her, to comfort himself with the knowledge that she was nearby so that he wouldn’t feel so alone. But what he had heard were sounds of intimacy. The sighs, the private words, the muffled shout, and he had heard the sharp delicacy of her voice as she cried out, he – Anton – a sly witness to their coupling.

Pinned by Mark’s question, he feels flustered with shame. ‘Of course I’m sure,’ he says, but his voice lacks conviction.

He keeps his eyes glued to the three figures on the other side of the road, watching as they turn into Number 43, walking up the path, reaching for the doorbell. What are they doing there? he thinks.

‘It’s just I had a call from Jake. Asking about you. About what happened to Mum.’

‘And what did you tell him?’

The door is drawn back, and he sees Hilary greet them – the reddish frizz of hair, the short, blocky figure. His heart hardens, gives a quick pulse of resentment. He knows that it was Hilary who told Leah. It was the sort of petty thing she would do. Yesterday there was another letter from her, more pleading, more anguish. He had left it with all of the others, ignored.

‘I said you didn’t do it. That it was a miscarriage of justice,’ Mark says.