‘Cut it,’ he said, his voice a rasping whisper. The chair was at an awkward angle and unsteady, just a plain wooden desk chair, spindle-backed with thin barley-twist legs. It wasn’t built to stop a man from killing himself. He moved his feet tentatively, trying to centre them, to keep the chair upright. ‘Alison,’ he said, then again, ‘Alison.’

She saw, suddenly, that she must act, and she turned and ran down the stairs and took a pair of kitchen scissors from the drawer. They had black plastic handles and the blades were blunt and discoloured with age. They could barely cut through paper these days, and certainly they’d never been called upon to save a man. Alison, preternaturally calm, took a second chair with her too, so that she could stand beside her brother without jeopardising his safety. She placed it alongside him, climbed up on to it, then began to press the blades of the scissors against the rope, sawing and pulling, while Peter wobbled and moaned, and reached for her with his hands, clutching at her arm. She ignored him. ‘This isn’t working,’ she said, as if to herself. ‘I’ll have to cut the flex.’ She shrugged off his hands and got down from the chair, went back downstairs to the fuse box by the front door, and switched off the mains. Back upstairs again, back on to the chair.

‘Let go of me,’ she said to Peter. ‘I need to stretch up and I can’t if you paw at me like that.’ She knew she sounded hostile, but there was work to be done here, and she soldiered on, stretching up above her brother to the light flex, which – though resistant at first – gave way at last to the dull blades of the scissors. The loss of tension from above threw Peter off balance and he fell to the floor, landing badly. Alison stepped down from her chair. They stared at each other, then she bent down and worked at the noose until it was wide and slack enough to pull over his head. He watched her face but, now, she wouldn’t meet his eyes.

‘There.’ She placed the rope and the flex, still with its light bulb attached, on to the floor next to him; then she took a few moments to steady herself and to hide her anger. He’d wanted to die. He’d been prepared to leave her. She felt a wave of loneliness, the cold reality of betrayal.

She had to go to Daniel. She needed him.