‘Nah,’ I said to him. ‘You’d be bored with just sitting and reading the papers now.’

‘I guarantee you, Joseph, I wouldn’t be bored.’

‘And besides, chasing the girls round soft play areas is the only exercise you get.’

He wiped the sweat from his forehead with a sleeve.

‘Not true. I ran for a bus the other week.’

‘Did you catch it?’

‘Irrelevant.’

I smiled and picked up my cutlery.

‘That’s a no, then.’

The steak and ale pie smelled good, beefy and rich. William was continuing to feed chips into his mouth one by one. He would eat all of them first, then all of the nuggets. Never a mixture. He was going through a phase of tackling the things on his plate one food type at a time. He was very particular about it. I turned back to Mel.

‘How’s your salad?’

‘Good, thanks. Could do with a bit less salad and a bit more Caesar, but on the whole –’

She stopped, her gaze rising over my shoulder like she had seen someone she recognised behind me. Her eyes widened a little. Then the recognition changed to something else.

Fear.

My back was to the door so I couldn’t see immediately who’d come in. But my first thought was: Ben. He came looking for Mel. And now he’s found her.

Protect Mel. Protect William.

I turned and looked to see who it was, pushing my chair sideways to shield my son.

Surely Ben wouldn’t do something in such a public place. Not in a pub full of people. There must be fifty witnesses in here.

But it wasn’t Ben.

It was Beth. Dressed all in black, dark hair tied back, her mouth a hard flat line. Red-rimmed eyes shifting from left to right and back again as she searched every face in the pub.

She looked the opposite of serene; she looked furious.

There was something metallic in her hand.

Protect them both.

She saw us, marched straight over and slammed a mobile phone down on the table.

Spoke in a voice that was loud enough for everyone in the pub to hear.

‘You fucking BITCH!’

21

Her words went off like a bomb inside the busy pub.

I had never heard Beth say fuck before. I’d never heard her swear before, or even raise her voice. She was the kind of woman who flinched when her husband dropped the f-bomb in polite conversation. For a second I couldn’t process it, any of it, and I sat there staring up at her as she leaned over the table at my wife, hate in her eyes. Something is happening. Something bad. In the space of a second, a kind of sound vacuum had grown around the four of us. Around Beth. She had sucked all the other sound out of the pub with a single word.

And it seemed like now she’d started, she couldn’t stop.

‘Fucking whore! How could you?’ Her cut-glass Home Counties accent only increased the impact of her words. The anger was coming off her in waves.