My smile was real. ‘Did you feel that? She’s started kicking.’

‘Not sure.’ His other hand was below the small of my back, lifting me towards him. ‘But we need to celebrate.’

That would be the best way to get him away from the steamer chest. ‘Shall we go upstairs?’

‘Always. But she’ll need to close her eyes, because I’m going to do things to you that no child should see.’

As he pulled me into the bedroom, I told myself that one more film hardly mattered, and I could thwart him by dragging the quilt on top of us to block the camera. But he was the one who thwarted me, tearing the quilt away and throwing it on the floor.

Now
The Robin

Two years and one month later

Bath, Thursday, 4 April 2019

When I arrive home from work, the black iron stairs that lead from the pavement down to the front door of my flat are slippery from the rain. But I am practised at navigating them quickly, which is what I need to do now, because I’m meeting Eliza and Alice in an hour for the pizza dinner we arranged while we were in the park yesterday morning.

As I approach my front door, my stomach drops the way it does when I skid in the shower and catch myself in the nick of time. There is a robin, lying on his back on the grey stones that pave my basement courtyard. The stones have darkened with water to mirror the grey skies above. He is so vivid against them, with his red chest and splash-of-white lower body. I know he is male, from his size as well as his intensity of colour. Peggy taught me to distinguish.

The robin looks perfect from the front, cradled in his soft brown wings. Tentatively, I roll him, forcing myself past my hesitation to touch him. There is a slash across his back, a gash of inside where only outside should be that makes me queasy. There is another flash of Jane’s face, once beautiful – so distorted by what I saw in that sad rented house.

How did the robin get here? Though a cat probably killed him, it couldn’t have positioned him so neatly, with no feathers or mess or blood anywhere that I can see. It is likely he was brought here by human hands and left for me. It again makes me think of Jane, carefully arranged in the bed despite the clumped and rumpled quilt.

I look up at the bullet-style security camera I had installed opposite the front door. Whoever did this managed to throw some kind of adhesive-backed cloth across the casing, which drapes over the lens too. It’s a low-tech solution but effective. Though I have a faint hope the camera caught him before the lens was covered, the likelihood is that that camera isn’t going to tell me anything.