When Dan went to Salford for his Thursday morning radio gig, Alison and McCulloch stayed in Sheffield and spent the day with Peter, the dog lending some earthy normality to their heightened emotions, their journey into the past. Peter lived in a small flat in a low-rise block near the hospital, a place with an unremitting absence of charm, not helped by the state of disrepair he’d let it get into, and the festering towers of takeaway cartons heaped across the kitchen surfaces like a BritArt installation. He led a solitary life, he said, apart from work and his visits to Bramall Lane to watch every Blades home match he could get to. This was how he liked it. He liked his flat too, just as it was. He wouldn’t let her clean it; he’d do it himself when it got just a little bit worse, he said. McCulloch ate a pizza crust under the table, and then whined and scratched at the door to go out, so they clipped on his lead and took a bus to the botanical gardens, where they lost themselves down the winding pathways and then occupied a wrought-iron bench and talked, in a faltering, careful way, about the things they had on their minds. First thing he asked her was did she drink? Yes, she said, but she had rules: never alone, never when she felt sad, and never vodka. He didn’t drink at all, he said. Teetotal. He’d drunk himself senseless a few times, after he left Brown Bayley’s, and he’d realised he had it in him, the capacity for self-destruction, so he hadn’t touched a drop for thirty years.

Alison said his capacity for self-destruction was as much Martin Baxter’s legacy as Catherine’s; then she told him, without unnecessary detail, what Baxter had done to her before she fled, and Peter’s eyes were black with hatred as he listened, and he told her Martin Baxter was killed in a hit-and-run, no more than a year after she left Sheffield. ‘Nobody ever got done for it, but he was hit full on by a speeding car, a pimped-up Escort. It knocked him down then reversed over him.’

She listened, and frowned. ‘How do you know those details?’

He shrugged.

‘Was it you?’ Ali said.

‘Toddy.’ He couldn’t look at her at the mention of his former lover’s name, just sat stiff-backed and stared ahead at the lawns and late roses.

‘I wish I’d done it,’ she said. ‘I wish I’d killed him.’ Then she asked about Catherine, told him that Sheila had told her about their mother’s death years ago, and that she hadn’t cried, only felt glad that he, Peter, was free of obligation. ‘Were you with her when she died?’ she asked.

He nodded. ‘She didn’t know it though, she were in a coma by then. She’d been laid up in hospital for weeks, longest she’d gone for years without a drink.’ That’s how he ended up as a hospital porter, he said; spent so long at the Northern General, he thought he might as well get paid for it.