‘Burning his things. Dominic’s things.’ His name is like bitter poison on her tongue and she almost spits it at me. She throws a pair of leather brogues into the fire, shoes that must have cost Dominic a fortune, and they disappear into the flames in a cloud of ash and smoke. ‘I don’t want anything of his in the house.’

‘What about the police? What if they need his things and you’ve burned them?’

‘They’ve taken everything they need.’ She pokes viciously at the flames again, her face hard. ‘I can’t sleep with his things in my house, Anna. I just want rid of him, to forget I ever met him.’

I wish that Kelly was here to help me manage Fran in this frame of mind, but Kelly no longer comes every day. Now that Dominic has been formally charged and is awaiting trial, Kelly has other families to deal with, and although she said she is only at the end of the phone, Fran hasn’t contacted her once. She says she’s relieved to see the back of her, that Kelly never helped anyway, she was merely there to spy on the family. I privately think that perhaps that was a good thing, if Dominic really is guilty of Laurel’s abduction. ‘Is he still not talking?’

‘No,’ she sniffs, and swipes at her face with the back of her hand, leaving a smear of sooty ash on the bridge of her nose. ‘He still says he didn’t take Laurel. Still refuses to admit to it and tell us where she is. I hope he rots in hell.’ She jabs at the fire ferociously, and I step back as sparks shower the ground by my feet.

‘And there’s still nothing to show where he was that night?’ I don’t know why I’m poking the bear, so to speak, only I suppose I feel like maybe Fran will be less unstable if she would only talk about things.

‘He says he was only driving around. He was thinking of leaving me, apparently.’ She lets out a bitter huff of laughter. ‘What utter bullshit. We had our ups and downs, of course we did, and I know now that he was cheating on me with Pamela – I’m not stupid. Maybe he would have left me eventually, but not that night. He’s just covering his arse, trying to justify why he didn’t come and meet us. Making up an excuse.’

‘Fran, I—’