‘Um. No, of course not. Look, I can’t explain it. I just panicked. It was stupid, and I shouldn’t have done it, but that’s it. That and the row, that’s all they have on me. It’s just – a coincidence. Bad luck.’ And how much bad luck could one person have in their life?

He looked at me, a new reserve in his eyes that had never been there before. ‘I wish I could understand.’

I couldn’t tell him. Not yet. Now it had finally happened, I was desperate to hold on to the bubble, the safe, warm place where he liked me, thought I was a good person.

‘What did they ask you?’ I said, changing the subject. ‘How did it – happen? She was stabbed?’

‘She was hit over the head as well,’ he said slowly. ‘Or she had some kind of head injury, anyway. I don’t know if I’m meant to tell you these—’

My mind was racing. ‘So the stabbing wasn’t what killed her?’

He winced. ‘I don’t know. They asked me if she’d hit her head any time in the previous few days – I said I didn’t know. If I’d been to the house that day, that sort of thing.’

‘But you picked Alex up from school that day, not from the house? You took him straight to your flat?’

‘Of course I did.’ He reached for the ignition. ‘Come on, let’s get out of here. We’re not thinking straight.’

I had no idea what was going on. Weariness overcame me. ‘We can’t go to mine, the police are still there. Oh God.’ I thought of them poking about in my things, touching them – that privacy such a hard-won privilege, now taken away.

He was spinning the wheel, sticking in the mud of the verges. ‘We’ll go to mine. It’s OK, Rachel.’

Alex’s place was a nondescript two-bed flat opposite the town hall on Main Street. His bedroom was bare and functional, with magnolia walls – a temporary space. Sam’s was brighter, with plastic bins full of toys and posters on the wall, in defiance of the rental terms. I stopped in the doorway and stared at them. Poor Sam. He would have to be brought here soon, to live permanently – but no, of course Alex could move back into the farmhouse once the police were done with it, because it was still his, after all. He’d grown up there.