She floats her eyes to the ceiling, pushes herself back, chair and all, with a violent squeak, and begins to bang her head against the wall, rhythmically, deliberately.

When he was a baby, he is told, he did this. He doesn’t know why, and doesn’t remember it. His parents didn’t know why either, but they told him the story more than once. How they bought a piece of yellow foam rubber from a market stall and glued it onto the headboard of his cot. How, by the time he was two, he had worn a hole in it.

You can’t save her, Jules said, stirring the bolognese.

He tugged his tie from his throat, draped it over a chair like road kill: flattened, finished.

You can’t save her if she won’t save herself. If she won’t even talk. What do you have to go on? You can’t prove she’s insane, only uncooperative. Maybe she wants to be convicted of murder. Maybe it suits her plans.

As always, he wished he’d said nothing. He knows this is her way of trying to connect with him: follow him to the place he has retreated to, his work. But he doesn’t want her there.

I’m not sure she has plans, he said.

You can’t be sure of anything if she won’t talk.

It’s early days, he said. I have a few sessions with her yet. And it’s not just assessment, either. I have an idea.

He had no intention of sharing the idea, so he laid the table. When he’d finished, Jules, who insists on making fresh spaghetti, was turning the handle of the pasta maker. Addressing herself to the unwinding worms: I really hope this isn’t about Flora.

A surge of emotion, so wild that at first he had trouble naming it. Breathe, Logan, breathe.

How would it be about Flora? And in his head, Please, God, don’t use her name.

She pulled the last worms out of the contraption, slid them from the bowl into boiling water.

You’re the psychologist, she said.

‌Salmon

I’ve an appointment with Dr Salmon.

He shakes the rain off his coat, folds it over his arm. He is given a visitor’s badge, a smile.

The receptionist is overfamiliar with faculty. She conspires with the telephone: Gabrielle, Dr Logan is here. As if they have been gossiping about him. He doesn’t like that she is on first-name terms with Dr Salmon.