Hobbes made to protest, but she cut him off. Her fist banged down on the table, and she started to cry out: ‘I am Jeannie Watts, I am forty-five years old. I live at twenty-nine Monastery Road, Hackney, London, postcode E9 5SZ. Jeannie Watts! I was born some few streets from here, on White Post Lane, near the train line. As a child, I heard the trains from my bedroom, coming and going in the night. I could smell the steam in the air.’

It was an enchantment against pain, a consolidation of a learned identity.

‘My parents were killed in 1942. They didn’t like the idea of me being evacuated, of being separated from me. We used to hide in the cellar of the local pub, the Star and Garter, whenever the sirens went off. It was so exciting! But then one night the all-clear was sounded, and we went up again, on to the streets. There was a bomb in the rubble of a house, and it … it …’

‘The bomb exploded?’

‘Yes. That’s right. And I lost everyone!’

Hobbes’s face was brutal in its look. ‘I don’t care about your past. Only about what happened that night, at Bridlemere. I think you stayed in the living room. You saw the arguments flare, and the shouting begin. I think you—’

‘Please—’

‘No, listen to me! Jeannie, don’t turn away. You were there, you saw everything. You did meet Adeline Graves. You talked to her. You said something to her, something that upset her. Is that right? And you saw her approaching with the scissors in her hands. You saw the look on her face. What was it? Sheer hatred? Or something more? Something … hopeful?’

He paused. He was exhausted. His muscles had tightened into knots.

The rain was pelting down now, loud against the window like shots of lead.

Jeannie Watts was shaking terribly.

Her mouth cracked open.

Her eyes, unblinking.

Hobbes told the story of that night, as he saw it, speaking coldly now.

‘Adeline drew close and she attacked you. Did you place your hands over the wound in your side, just here, in the midriff?’

He showed her the place on his own body.

And she copied his movement on hers.

‘How did it feel, can you remember? Can you remember that moment, Jeannie, as the blood left you, as it drained away? What was it like, when the darkness closed in?’

Her face was frozen. All traces of emotion gone.

She might have been a statue at that point, or a broken machine.

Only the quiver of her lips gave evidence of life.

Hobbes asked again, fiercely now: ‘How did it feel, when Adeline attacked you, when she killed you?’

The whole conversation rested on this one statement.

He waited, hardly breathing.

Everything he’d suspected, or dared to suspect, was now coming true.

Jeannie Watts frowned.

The drama was coming to its final act. One of her hands came up to her face, to rub at her cheeks, her brow, the area around her mouth. To all intents and purposes, she was removing traces of stage paint from her skin.