I felt dead inside; I had lost any vestige of hope I had left. He might have said I was beautiful but still, he left. And I was a bad, bad woman who had cheated on her husband; who yearned to run away, who had, at one mad moment, forgotten she was a mother and only remembered that she was full of lust and longing and – love.

I carried his jumper upstairs and I breathed in its smell, just once. Then I tucked it into my bottom drawer, beneath my old pyjamas.

Chapter Twenty-Three
THE TIMES, MAY 2008

Record producer James Miller has reportedly been granted bail. He is at home in Gloucestershire awaiting the outcome of an investigation conducted by the Met, apparently in conjunction with drug trafficking. As yet no charges have been brought. Thirty-nine-year-old Miller declined to comment, although friends say he is fully intending to prove his innocence, should there be any need to.

They sent James home the next day. He was exhausted; hadn’t slept at all, he said, and he looked thinner already, though he surely couldn’t be.

‘I’ve been fucking set up, Rose,’ he kept saying. He sat at the kitchen table and drank a bottle of heavy burgundy, glass after glass of it. ‘He set me up.’

‘Who?’ I couldn’t bear it. ‘Do you mean Liam?’

James stared at me, his mouth stained red. ‘No, not bloody Liam. Of course not Liam. The bastard who did the deal on the importation. He set me up.’

‘Who was he, though? Who was it?’

‘He never told me his full name. Saquib something.’

‘You must have had an idea, though, James, of who you were dealing with?’ I was nonplussed by his apparent denseness. He must be lying again, he had to be. ‘Surely?’

‘I met him in London before I went,’ was all he would say before he drank himself to sleep.

And I watched him and I thought perhaps I should feel real guilt about Danny, but I knew that I didn’t. Not really. I had lost James long, long ago.

In the morning over breakfast, I asked James why the police had said that he had never left the country.

‘Because they’re out to fucking get me.’ He slammed the chair against the kitchen wall so hard it dented the paintwork, his plate of toast flying to the ground. ‘They’re all out to get me. Don’t you understand?’

He yelled so loudly that Effie began to cry.

‘It’s OK, darling,’ I crooned, cradling her to me as if she was still a baby. She looked up at me with woeful eyes.

‘I want Daddy to go away again.’