I stood watching him as he climbed the front stairs. At the top he turned. ‘You may feel guilty about Huriyyah, though, peace be with her. You may feel that guilt for ever.’

‘But I—’

He slammed the front door in my face.

Wearily I drove back to Jen’s for the night. Crossing the river, Parliament silhouetted against the night sky, I supposed it was Lord Higham who had sent the note, although I guessed I’d never know for sure. Atoning finally for his sins.

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Long is the way
And hard,
that out of Hell leads up to the Light.

Paradise Lost, Milton

I was sitting in my mother’s garden when Ruth rang to tell me the news. As quickly as it had started, it was over. Three days later, a mistrial was declared. One of the jurors alleged he had been approached by an anonymous source to sway his verdict. At the same time, Saquib Baheev had apparently confessed that he had been coerced to point the finger at James – and suddenly, all charges against James were dropped.

My husband was coming home. I put the phone down and just sat for a while, watching the children finish their tea on the tartan blanket laid on the lush emerald grass. It was a warm, rather sultry evening, given that it was May.

‘You’ve got tomato ketchup on your forehead,’ Alicia was telling Effie. ‘Wipe it off.’

‘Where?’ The little girl put her hand up and smeared the sickly red sauce into her hair. ‘I haven’t. Have I?’

‘Have I got a forehead?’ Freddie said. ‘Where’s my five-head?’

I watched them, feeling such incredible love that I could hardly believe there had been a day when I had even thought I could have run away from them, from my life. The madness had truly consumed me for a while, but now I was calm again.

Calm – but without hope for myself. I had seen hope in Danny, I’d grasped it between my fingers, that was what he had brought me. It kept me going for a while during bleak days, that tiny scrap. But in the end it had got so tattered, so dirty and mauled and torn that there was really nothing left.

My only hope now lay in the children. My one wish now was that their lives would be carefree and easy for as long as I could make them so. They would be enough for me.

I sat numbly in the evening sun, knowing now that James would come home and the children would be ecstatic. Gingerly I pressed the small lump beneath my eye, the lump that had never quite disappeared, vestige of the last back-hander James had given me that cold spring day a year ago. Soon I’d have to tell him that I wanted to leave, that I was taking the children too – and how much longer could they be carefree then?