I was looking into a huge ward of at least fifty beds. Occupying them were as many young women, sitting up under the blankets, leaning against the walls and breathing deeply or slowly walking up and down the room assisted by nurses. They were all, every one, just hours away from giving birth.

When I was a girl I had a collie dog named Sheba. When she died I screamed and ran out the gate, to the beach. I sat on the sand with my knees pulled up to my chin, trying to reconcile the images of my father who cuddled me on his lap at our warm dinner table, cheerily carving slices of meat while a pipe dripped from his lip, with the man who had tossed Sheba’s body into a pit in the back garden without any emotion at all. Now that image came to my mind again, as the thoughts tumbled. Could it really be that Nick too had this side to him, something cold and hard?

I could hardly think as I wandered out of the hospital and along streets I didn’t recognize, every step feeling like someone else was taking it, until I found myself at the Thames. My fingers twisted through the wire links on the fence that kept us from the water, and I hung there like one of the D-Day survivors who you saw on park benches staring ahead for hours on end.

Nick had hidden his continuing relationship with Lorelei from me, their involvement in black-market medicines. Had he also been using me as a test subject to see if the drug – a drug that mimicked the effects of pregnancy – worked? He had kept monitoring my heart rate and blood pressure. And the night that he was released I suggested that we try for another child and yet he had been reluctant – when he had previously been so happy that I seemed to be pregnant.

But then, sometimes women’s cycles do stop for no special reason. So it could simply be that mine had halted for a while and the pregnancy test that he gave me was unreliable. And when Nick had talked on the telephone about testing the medicine on a private patient, he could have meant just that: one of his private patients. Equally, his reluctance to think about having another child at that moment was quite understandable, given the awful few days he had just experienced.

My mind swung one way and then the other.