That night, under questioning, Amjad Maher admitted to having entered Harcourt House at 7.40 a.m. through the kitchen door. The first thing he saw, upon entering the house, was his wife’s orange headscarf, which he had gifted to her, on top of a pile of washing. He put it round his neck and went to find her, climbing the back stairs and proceeding along the first-floor passage. Winter mornings are dark in the islands. When he reached the landing, where the front staircase curves upwards to the attic, his way was lit by the light coming from under Mariam’s door. Like a runway, he told the police, taking me back to her. His wife was sitting up in bed, reading a book of poetry.

Mariam! he exclaimed.

Naturally, she screamed.

Amjad Maher had ascertained, from exterior surveillance of the house the previous evening, that his wife was sleeping at the top of the house. He saw her going up to bed that night; he watched her ascend. There are no curtains over the long stair windows.

The mistake Amjad Maher made was to have assumed that Mariam was alone in the house. But Sister Lucija was also staying. It was she who ran upstairs, knocked Amjad Maher over the head with the helmet from the medieval suit of armour in the hall, wrestled him to the floor and, with Mariam’s help, dragged him down two flights of stairs to the cellar, which they bolted from the outside. Then the two of them fled.

The police were not alerted to the intruder/victim until that night, when Eva returned to the house. She stayed on the phone to the police as she walked upstairs, and everything until the moment when she walked down to the cellar door was recorded on the call. By then the police were on their way. They arrived in time to see Eva Levi and Amjad Maher hurrying out of the house, and up through the wood. Because of the emergency call, and the break-in, and the fact that Amjad’s van with Islamic writing on the outside had been spotted in the Aldi car park, the police followed them, their torches shaking.

RUTH: I arrived in the second dispatch car just after Eva’s son Henry. I wasn’t in time to see the boat.

LUCIJA: I saw it. I had come back, having put Mariam on Papa Astrid, to let her husband out of his hole. He must’ve been scared. There was apple juice and wine and pickles. But still.