I couldn’t go there any time soon, though, could I? There would be issues with contaminated evidence, forensics. Perhaps Anna had been attacked in her home – the possibilities were almost endless with a head injury: interrupting a burglar or intruder, or maybe someone she’d invited over. A friend. Or a lover – could Anna have been seeing someone too? But why then would she be so upset about Alex and me? Then maybe an accidental fall, a panicked response. Why stab her too, though? Trying to cover it up?

Already I was thinking like a criminal. I stood in the living room, rubbing my goosefleshed arms. I had nothing here, no toothbrush or clean pants or pyjamas. Part of me was waiting to wake up and find it was all one of the dreams I still had, the prison nightmares. I could never sleep in a room with the door shut. But this was real, it was happening. Alex filled the kettle, but didn’t switch it on. He leaned on the kitchen counter and breathed out hard.

‘I don’t understand this, Rachel.’

‘Neither do I! Christ, we weren’t on the best of terms, Anna and me, but I’d never have done something like this. I never wanted her dead, for God’s sake. Would anyone else want to kill her – was she seeing someone, do you think?’

He nodded slowly. ‘I think maybe. She didn’t say, but she was being kind of cagey about her plans the last week or so. She liked being angry at me over you, I guess, so if she admitted she was doing the same she’d have to stop her nonsense. Finalise the divorce.’ Anna had been difficult over it, one reason they were still, technically, married. She had made threats, as people do. That she’d stop him seeing Sam, that she’d clean him out for every penny he had, she’d keep the family home, which Alex’s great-grandfather had built over a hundred years ago, that sort of thing. Anna didn’t work, except for some massage clients and yoga sessions in the village hall, so he was having to support her anyway.

The silence between us stretched, the noises from the street outside, this unfamiliar and uncomfortable front room with no side lamps, laundry piled on a chair and a dirty plate on the coffee table. It began to overwhelm me, the hopelessness. Why had I thought I was allowed to be happy? Or that the past was past, and my future might be bright: a loving relationship, a stepchild, perhaps a baby of my own? I wasn’t too old – Anna had been about my age when she had Sam. Instead there was this. Another murder enquiry. Cold interview rooms in police stations. And I realised I could not keep pretending. Of course it had caught up to me.