But then she realised how it would look to the police. She was being judged on everything. She knew that. From the clothes she wore to the way she spoke; the way she treated her husband to the way he treated her in return. And so she walked out alongside him without speaking, and climbed awkwardly into the low passenger seat of the Jaguar, her body feeling stiff and underused.

She needed some exercise, she thought, as she closed the door. A run. A swim. And then she needed to play something. God, she needed that. To let her hands move over her harp strings, and blot out the last nightmarish forty-eight hours.

They were halfway home when Niall broke the silence, and he did so hesitantly.

‘We need to talk about – things,’ he said.

‘Do we?’

She saw the way he grimaced before he said, ‘Yes. We do. I think we both owe each other some kind of an explanation.’

‘I tried to give you one yesterday,’ she said, coldly. ‘But you wouldn’t see me.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘I wasn’t quite … You need to understand what a shock it was.’

She found herself looking at him in dumb shock. ‘You want me to understand how shocking it all is for you? To find out that your wife had woken up next to a dead man? You want me to sympathise with that?’

‘How do I even know that’s true?’ Niall countered, loudly. ‘I have no idea what happened.’

‘And neither do I,’ Louise told him, wondering why she didn’t feel more as she said it. ‘And we should both have faced it, together. We should have been a team. But we haven’t been a team for a long time, Niall. And I’m so sad that I’ve wasted so much worry over us when we were dead in the water months ago.’

He stopped trying to talk, after that, and Louise turned sideways to lean against the door. There were so many things she should have been asking him, really. Whether he was in love with Dina. Whether they’d agreed to get back together. And what the police had asked him about, too. But she felt too tired for all of it.

Tailing a vehicle was both easier and more challenging than people thought. It was easier because most people were so poor at checking the rear-view mirror. You could be behind someone for miles without them even noticing, and even when they did notice, they didn’t necessarily think anything of it. Cars generally followed major routes, and if you peeled off at some point before their destination, you were usually forgotten pretty quickly. Assuming, of course, that they weren’t looking out for you.