A little later, Logan hears the front door click. He goes to the sitting room to open her laptop and Achilles follows him in. I’m not prying, he tells the dog, I’m investigating. He doesn’t know Jules’s passwords, but the machine does. So, without fuss, here is her TwitFace profile, here are her ‘friends’, and a quick scroll down, a click, give him Merriweather’s shaving-advert face. With, it’s true, a woman’s adoring face beside it. This is shit, he tells the dog as he pages through the photos, but I have to be sure. And after a few seconds, no question, the man’s in love. And not with Logan’s wife, but with a brunette called Sam Rollinson.

But there’s something up. Sam and I, Sam and I, Sam and I say the updates, driving inexorably towards a boutique wedding until they hit an invisible wall. Five months since Cunty has posted a word. Something’s up, he tells the dog. Something’s definitely up.

Back at his own laptop – not wanting the search to surface like a lewd suggestion in his wife’s browser’s bar – he enters ‘Simon Merriweather’. Nothing unusual. Place-holder stuff, a small biographical puff on the Freedom from Fistula website, an interview for some charity magazine, and nothing in News. He enters the woman’s name. A model called Sam Rollinson has digitally obliterated less celebrated Sam Rollinsons. He selects ‘images’ and scrolls past her remarkable cheekbones for several pages, waiting to see the face that looked adoringly into Cunty’s. But then something comes up that isn’t a face.

It is the fuselage, the wing, of a small white plane which has crashed into an African landscape.

When he has read more than he needs to, Logan closes the lid of his laptop. Cunty’s woman is five months dead. How grief might drive a man over the cliff of reasonable behaviour he understands acutely. Repeatedly, Flora’s death has nudged him into the thin membrane that divides a sad man from a madman. And Flora, for all her perfection, was not the only good thing in his life.

What if Cunty’s woman was? What if her loss clanged the huge unsounded bell of Jules’s loss a decade before? And what if the unrecoverable loss of his second fiancée provoked him to consider the recoverable loss of his first? He counted forward from the day of Sam’s death to the week he had received the article. The timing was perfect. A week for shock plus a month for grief. Another month for the cogs that grind towards revenge.