Annabel didn’t know who he was, so when she went to the police, she simply told them the truth: a man with an Irish accent had phoned her about me, and when the Met traced the call back from her landline, they zeroed in on a phone box in Luton. They sourced CCTV footage, and appealed locally for witnesses, trying to figure out what relationship the unknown caller might have had to Robert Zaid, and then finally they found something on film: the back of a man – possibly in his forties or fifties, skinny, shaved head, with stubble or perhaps a beard. They didn’t locate him, even after his picture ran in the papers.

But he was out in the open now.

And that made both of us vulnerable.

Yet Healy had put everything on the line by making that call, and he’d done it again in the days preceding it. He’d broken cover, gone to Yorkshire and got inside Isaac Mills’s home, looking for copies of the audio recordings from the village. Or, at least, one recording in particular: the one of him and me in the farmhouse, in the hour after hitting the deer, where I said he needed to hide or we were both going to prison. The one in which I said he was supposed to be dead.

He found the recording on Mills’s laptop.

Knowing that deleting the file wouldn’t necessarily put it out of reach for ever, especially if any forensic techs came looking, he took the whole laptop instead. Again, his sacrifice moved me, not because I believed it got us out of trouble, or even that I thought it was the best thing to have done, but simply for the fact that he’d done it at all. In all the miles we’d walked over the years, it had always felt like it was me bailing him out, me trying to prevent him from self-destructing, me keeping him from being swallowed by the shadows – but in doing what he did, it felt like a repayment in full. His actions didn’t insulate us and, in an uncomfortable parallel, in his faked death, in our lies, in our perpetual fear of being caught, neither of us was so far from the deceit that Adrian Vale had built his life on.

But there was one big difference.

Healy’s actions were altruistic and noble.

In a way, given the fact that his daughter was dead and he could never talk to his ex-wife or sons again, it had been a heroic act for the only family he had left.