I felt along the top of the door and there it was, sure enough, a key with a little green fob. I tried it and the door opened smoothly. There wasn’t an alarm, was there? Not around here, where people barely locked their doors? I heard nothing as I walked inside, wiping dirt from my shoes on to the mat. Houses have a strange silence with no one in them. The hum of the fridge seems louder, and here the occasional rumble from the Aga. The place was untidy, shoes piled up at the door, letters in a stack on the hall table, and the surfaces dusty with fingerprint powder, dirty dishes on the table and around the sink. Signs of the police search, muddy boot prints and furniture left askew, and I wondered if they’d found anything here, any of Anna’s secrets. Years in prison had taught me to keep things in order, or be punished for it, but I resisted tidying or even touching anything here. As it was, I’d surely be leaving something just by being here, a dropped hair or fibre. I had learned from the trial that you didn’t always leave DNA traces just by touching things. There was a woman’s coat hanging by the door, a distinctive cerise colour – Anna’s coat. I remembered her wearing it when she confronted me that day outside the Co-op. I don’t want you near him! You hear? Stay away from my family! This was her house, filled with her things, with her skin cells, her essence. I shouldn’t be here.

I didn’t know what I was looking for. Something, anything, that might explain why Anna was found murdered a mile from her house. And what was she doing in the forest in the first place? She wasn’t wearing her coat when I found her, or I’d have recognised it, I was sure. Was that strange, on a cold morning, or did she have another? I wished I had paid more attention to the body lying in the clearing, because of course the police wouldn’t tell me anything, and if I asked them it would be even more suspicious.

There was a calendar beside the fridge, a freebie from a local garage. Marked on it with a loopy hand was Alex’s name, over and over. Days when he had Sam, probably. Also other people’s names and times – massage clients, I supposed. Alex had told me she sometimes drove to them, a folding table crammed in her car, as I’d seen on that day at the Co-op, but had she also invited people into this house? That was dangerous, surely.