She rubbed her hands together and felt the radiator under the bay window. The room was chilly and miserable. She pulled her cardigan around her shoulders and stared out of the window.

‘The Ranger was the only one I could ever talk to. Owen. He used to come to the house sometimes to see if I was all right. But only when Warren wasn’t around. Warren wouldn’t have him near the farm, if he could help it.’

Cooper sighed with relief. That sounded much more like the Owen Fox that he knew. How could Mark Roper have got it so wrong about the reason for Owen’s visits?

‘Do you think I should go back?’ said Yvonne.

They stared at her. ‘Mrs Leach, there must have been something that frightened you enough to make you leave,’ said Fry.

Yvonne Leach nodded. She made them sit down on the bed. Then she told them how her husband used to threaten her when she wouldn’t have sex, how he had broken the lock of the door when she had gone to sleep in another room.

‘He’s a highly sexed man. He always has been. It’s one of the things that attracted me to him, once.’

She told them how much worse her husband had been since the farm had got into financial trouble. She knew that things were bad. She didn’t know what the debts were – Warren never told her things like that – but she knew it was very bad. She could understand why Warren drank. It was very hard on him, the way things had gone. But it made his temper even worse, and he always took it out on her. She seemed to provoke him simply by being there. She had left, she said, because she didn’t want the boys to see it any more. She thought, if she was out of the way, he would have less to provoke him and wouldn’t drink so much.

‘It was the most difficult decision I ever made,’ she said.

Cooper realized Yvonne Leach was one of those women who had to feel they were needed, that they had a role to perform to give meaning to their lives. Some women were afraid of stepping out of their place and finding that the gap they left had closed up behind them straight away. He imagined Yvonne’s fear was that everyone would forget about her in a single moment and carry on with their lives as if nothing had happened, as if she had never been there. And then she would know that her life had never had any meaning at all.

‘Because I love him, you see,’ said Yvonne.

The landlady knocked on the door and brought in a tray of tea for the visitors, looking at them curiously, with the air of being prepared to welcome them as long as they didn’t put their shoes on the bed and steal the soap.