Mel said: ‘Do you want Joe to go somewhere else?’

In normal circumstances I would have taken the hint and made myself scarce. But these weren’t normal circumstances, and I wanted to hear what Ben might have told her in the last thirty-six hours. She was torn between a desire for privacy – to keep this wives-only – and the desire to avoid causing offence. On a normal day Beth would rather die than give offence.

‘No, it’s fine,’ she said in a small voice. ‘It’s fine.’

‘What happened, Beth?’ I said, as gently as I could manage.

Mel shot me a sharp look that said, Let me handle this.

‘Take your time, Bee,’ she said.

Beth took a sip of herbal tea, setting the cup carefully back down on the glass-topped table as if she was worried both might shatter with the slightest force.

‘It’s Ben. He’s . . . I don’t know.’ She always spoke quietly, and I’d never heard her raise her voice. But today she was almost whispering.

‘Nothing goes further than this room, Bee. You’re among friends here, we’re on your side.’

Beth crossed her arms tightly across her stomach, shoulders hunched.

‘I just can’t work out what I did wrong,’ she said. ‘What I did to set him off.’

‘Tell us what’s happened, Bee.’

‘It’s like a nightmare. Like Jekyll and Hyde.’

‘Take your time.’

‘OK. So two nights ago, Ben came home really late. I was in bed asleep and he woke me up. He never normally tells me when he’s getting home, but this was out of the ordinary, it was almost midnight. He was drunk, I think. Goodness knows how he managed to drive home. You’ve never seen him like that. Sometimes he gets . . .’ She tailed off.

Mel sat forward, her voice soft.

‘How does he get, Bee?’

‘Sometimes when he’s upset with things at work he gets drunk, and when he’s really drunk, he gets angry. He breaks things.’

‘At work, or home?’

‘At our house,’ she said in a small voice. ‘At home.’

‘What else does he do?’

‘How do you mean?’

‘Does he hurt you as well?’

Just like my Mel. Straight to the point.

Beth closed her eyes, her chin quivering.

‘Has he done this before?’ I asked.

She looked away, lips clamped together. A tear ran down her cheek and she wiped it away quickly with the heel of her hand.

‘This last year, since we left Manchester and moved to London, a lot of the time he’s seemed so distant. Angry sometimes. Refuses to talk to me about it. Mood swings, all the time. One minute he’s absolutely fine, the next minute . . .’

‘But has he hurt you before?’ I said.

Beth nodded, taking the tissue Mel offered her.

I felt the ache in my back from where Ben had slammed me against his car. He was pretty strong for a smaller guy. I supposed domestic violence was more common than people thought, but I had never actually known anyone who’d been an abuser. Jesus.