‘Ten!’ he shouted, a smear of mud on his chin. ‘I’m first to ten! I win!’

‘Good game,’ I said.

‘First to fifteen?’ he said hopefully, blinking up at me.

Shielding my phone from the rain, I looked at the screen. It showed the text message icon in the notifications bar. I clicked on it, checking over my shoulder to see if Mel had noticed. She was still sitting on the swing seat, looking at our son, a desolately sad look on her face.

The message was from Ben.

You want to know the truth big fella? Let’s meet. There’s something I need to show you.

3.25 p.m. Ben mob

Raindrops spotted the phone’s screen, distorting the words.

Let’s meet.

26

I kept my distance from Mel for the rest of the day. Seeing her, hearing her voice, gave me a pain in my chest like there was a boulder pressing on my ribcage. I didn’t know what to say to her, what was supposed to happen next. We were in uncharted territory: my marriage was a shipwreck and I had been washed up on some strange shore where I didn’t speak the language. There was anger too, but mostly a plunging sadness, a sense that much had been lost between us that might never be regained.

Mel put William in the bath after we came in from football, and then made his tea. I shut myself in the study with a bottle of red wine and thought further about the invitation from Ben.

There’s something I need to show you.

But what? And why now? Not to apologise, surely. That was not his style at all.

It could be a trap. Maybe he was going to finish what he’d started on Thursday, with a shotgun to even the odds. Mel had been taken away from him and he couldn’t deal with it, he thought I had threatened to hurt her if she didn’t end their relationship; God alone knew what kind of man he thought I was. Perhaps he thought he had to protect Mel from me, teach me a lesson. I had learned things about Ben in the last forty-eight hours that I would never have suspected, and had to be ready for him if he turned violent again.

It still begged the question: what did he have that he needed to show me?

I booted up the PC and refilled my glass as the computer whirred into life.

Ben had texted a map of the meeting place: a close-up picture of a page from a London A–Z, lots of green space, the A4140 going through the middle of it, Kingsbury HA9, Barn Hill, Fryent Country Park.

Bridge in the park near the open-air theatre. 10 a.m. tomorrow.

Fryent Country Park wasn’t too far away. A few miles north-west, near the bottom of the M1, but still in London. Ben did his triathlon training there, something about being able to run and run without bumping into anyone you knew when you were red-faced and pouring sweat like you were going to have a heart attack. I guessed he knew it pretty well. The satellite image on Google Earth showed an open-air stage by a lake in the southern part of the park. It looked fairly isolated on the map, plenty of trees and no houses nearby. It was an interesting choice. If he had wanted to meet in public, with lots of witnesses and bystanders, he could have chosen one of a thousand other places. But instead he had chosen a big country park with plenty of trees and uneven ground where – at 10 a.m. on a Monday morning – we might not see another soul.