‘I didn’t ask. I couldn’t bring myself to ask. But they looked like, you know, fingernails had caused them. Things just haven’t been great between us.’

I could feel my skin start to burn. I was flushed with embarrassment. I should have asked him. I should have told the police. I should have admitted before now that things were terribly wrong in our relationship. But I thought it was just that – a marriage in free fall, not a possible sign of something worse.

And Clare? With her head leaning towards his in the picture … My friend, for whom I was grieving, had she betrayed me in the worst way? So much ran through my head. Had my husband been her mystery man? The man she wouldn’t, or couldn’t tell us about. The police thought whoever it was had been trying to keep their liaison secret. They might be married. Could it be Paul?

Was he really capable of killing someone? I felt my stomach start to turn.

‘I don’t feel well,’ I managed to mutter, wanting to run from the room to be sick, but I didn’t know where the toilets were.

My head was spinning as the questions I asked of myself came thick and fast and memories flooded in. Clare and Paul sitting together in a corner after a dinner party, deep in conversation. Their heads bowed close together. Them taking Beth to the panto together the year Molly was born and I was too pregnant to sit through a few hours in the theatre. Clare had jumped at the idea. The pinging messages late at night on Paul’s phone. Work stuff, he said. Clare being coy about her new man. It was more than just the fear of jinxing it, wasn’t it?

I felt the heat rise at the back of my neck. A cold sweat broke out. I was going to be sick, I knew it, and I glanced around the room until I spotted a wastepaper basket, into which I emptied my stomach in great heaving sobs.

Constable King was sitting beside me, encouraging me to sip from a cold glass of water that she’d brought into the room. She’d dampened some paper towels and was using them to cool my forehead and the back of my neck.

Her voice was gentle and calm. Soft. I let it wash over me. She was a nice woman, I thought, although she didn’t look much older than Beth. No wrinkles, I thought as I focused on her face. Clear skin, minimal make-up. That wouldn’t last past her mid-thirties. She had one of those pixie haircuts, cropped, that anyone with anything less than perfectly sculpted cheekbones couldn’t get away with, but she carried it well.

‘What age are you?’ I asked, my tongue feeling thick and heavy in my mouth.

‘Twenty-nine,’ she said. ‘Big birthday next year.’