It took him no longer than three minutes to get dressed. He came clattering back down the stairs with a certain assumed heroism, like the captain leading a football team out; banged the front door shut with a sense of purpose but an appropriate respect for the stained-glass panel, because Jean had told him about that before. He reappeared almost immediately to get his wallet, and made a second exit.

Jean exhaled. She’d handled that well. She preferred it like this. She needed to be on her own with her thoughts again, even though those thoughts kept circling round to the same, impossible question: why? Why was James doing this? What had brought him to this? Why did she not already know the answers?

She sat on the stairs, smoothed down her dress, looked at the phone – if only it would ring now. She would know what to do then.

I could call the police, she thought. But someone had already done that, according to Sally; in fact, several people had done it. And the police available to Jean would only be the balding, gloomy men in the station down the road. They’d not even found the teenager who snatched Gloria’s handbag from a moped, even though he was apparently covered in tattoos; they were hardly going to track down someone in London from a single text message, were they?

If he was in London. It was inexcusable that she didn’t know. She felt that even if the phone rang, if James was there, it wouldn’t be completely obvious what she was meant to say. What’s the matter?, she would ask. What can I do? The question, in fact, was the same, whether she could get hold of James or not. What can I do? What should I have done already?

The walls clicked and creaked, the kitchen appliances conferred in occasional bleeps. The wind was moaning in a way which had seemed cosy to her only a few hours ago, when they went to bed, when Lee’s body was warm next to hers, and there was no reason to think that anything was wrong. She tried to think what she had been doing at the very moment James sent his message. Probably she had just been drifting off to sleep. Thinking about Sally. Wondering what Sally had planned for her weekend, which was already under way. But not thinking of James, not really.