But watching him hold it out to her, with such pathos, she found that she couldn’t refuse to take it. She took two steps and stretched to cross the gap between them until it was in her fingers.

And then she opened the hinged lid, while trying not to stop looking at him.

What she saw made no sense at first. There was nothing in there but hair. Strands and fragments of hair, all of them dark. Two of them so dark as to be almost black. All of them coiled up and slotted into neat squares.

And then her hand went to her own hair, and she suddenly understood.

‘You must have been one of many,’ Issa said, quietly. ‘You must have been just one of a long list. It wasn’t your fault.’

Louise took a large, shaky breath. ‘It is my fault. I was angry. And hurting. And I flirted with him.’ Her vision had become fragmented as her eyes filled with tears. ‘I sat at the bar with him for half an hour. An hour. I’m not sure. And I sank drink after drink with him and I laughed at everything he said, and I put my hand on his knee, and I told him – I told him that I’d like to take him home with me.’ She gave a great, heaving sob. ‘And I didn’t even mean it. I didn’t mean it.’

Issa’s jaw moved. For a moment he looked angry. But then he said, ‘I think he would have followed you anyway.’

There was a long silence, which wasn’t really silence because of the rush of cars from the motorway.

‘I think I killed him,’ she said, a little later, remembering the slick feeling of hot blood on her fingers. Remembering that he had made a strange laughing sound that had turned into a groan. ‘I think I killed him.’

And Issa, to her profound sadness and humiliation and relief, said, ‘It’s OK.’

The back door of the shop opened so hard that it banged back against the wall, and the rotund police sergeant cannoned through it, followed quickly by April, who looked so terrified it was almost funny.

‘It’s all right,’ Louise said, holding out a hand. ‘He just needed to show me something.’

And then April flung her arms round her, and Louise felt as though her legs had turned into string. Perhaps harp strings. And she laughed as she slid through the embrace and sat heavily on the tarmac.

‘We’ll need to know about Friday night,’ Jonah told Issa an hour and a half later. ‘You went to find him, didn’t you?’