‘It’s fine,’ James said. ‘I’m just sorry Picton left you there.’

‘Thanks. Do you mind if I just go and get my keys? I remember putting them down in the studio.’

‘Sure. I’ll get the kettle on. Coffee or tea?’

In the studio, Petra surveyed the headphone jacks alongside the recording booth partition and thought about what she had been intending to do.

‘What are your plans for this place?’ she asked.

‘Well, of course we’re looking to start up the studio again. My dad got this great console for a steal. He’s converting a couple of flats next door, and upstairs there’s loads of space. We could bash out the front wall, make it into windows, change the wood, make it really light. Japandi, you know?’

Petra nodded. She didn’t know.

‘Dad said he heard someone saying something about art therapy. He put on a strangled accent. “Good way to keep underemployed creatives busy,” he said. That could be a wheeze. People will pay good money to soothe their darlings’ bruised emotions.’

‘Art therapy?’ A wheeze. Right.

28

28 Suki’s pain pills were helping. As Petra doodled on a pad at the counter, she sensed the stabs of embarrassment and shame and fear and the fathomless, sucking ache of loss becoming blunter. They kept ambushing her, appearing out of the mist, but right now they sank back again without causing too much harm.

Thank God she’d been careful yesterday. It was luck that James had found her, not Worthing; she hadn’t gone to the studio with a plan, but things had resolved themselves. She worked to retain the thought processes that had led her to the studio yesterday, that had led her to think it would be the right thing to electrocute a man for a generalised sin that wasn’t directly against her. What had prompted the stupid idea? She concentrated on remembering herself, giving voice and validation to her pain, instead of brushing it off like she had all her life. She was mourning her mother. It was bound to hurt; she was bound to act emotionally. She had every right. Being rejected by someone she thought she really loved was just the dusting on top.

A beam of rage scorched through the haze. ‘Art therapy, can you believe it?’ Petra called across to wherever Suki was. ‘That was Vincent’s dream. They obviously heard it from him and jackdawed it, or magpied it, or whatever the hell you call it.’ Only now she glanced up to confirm there were no customers in. ‘He could work all his life and not have the capital to set up his own practice, but people like the Worthings can just dabble, they can set up a little side hustle for a wheeze. A fucking wheeze. Like he’s a kid in the bloody Beano.’