When John came into the kitchen with the shotgun, Katrina was surprised at her own reaction: she was not shocked. Perhaps for some time she had known, without knowing, that it would come to this. Of course he would kill her.

“You bitch,” he was saying, and his voice was very quiet to be saying such savage words. But Katrina was grateful he wasn’t shouting. Beth was in her arms, Nicky was watching television in the living room and Tommy was upstairs. She didn’t want them to be frightened.

“You fucking bitch,” her husband said. “You think you can just leave? You whore. Take my kids away? You bitch.”

Oh, Katrina thought, feeling oddly calm. I should have been more careful. She wondered how long he had known. Days, perhaps, or even weeks. He’d given nothing away, not even at tea half an hour before. That was so like him.

She said, “Let me go and give Beth to Nicky.”

“Stay where you are, you fucking whore.”

All right then. Katrina placed Beth down very gently on the floor. “There you go, my love,” she said. “Sit there for now.”

She had thought Beth would protest, but she did not. She did not even use the cupboard doors to pull herself to her feet, but sat where she was, eyes wide, only reaching out gently to touch her mother’s leg.

John did not look crazed as she might have imagined he would. He looked like himself. His hands, holding the gun up in front of him, were steady. Katrina knew that her own strange composure was the product of extreme terror. As soon as she had seen the gun, she had moved beyond ordinary fear into a half-world she had never experienced before; it was like an out-of-body experience.

She said, “John, please will you put the gun down? Whatever I’ve done, I’m sorry. I’d never leave you. You’re my husband.”

“Liar! You won’t leave because I won’t give you the chance, you fucking bitch.”

It was no good. Katrina knew that. She saw the whole course of their relationship in an instant, how she had been deceived about him, but how she was to blame too; she had wanted something from him, and had seen only what fitted her idea of him, an idea she had plucked out of thin air. She had wanted strength and so she had seen it in him, where in fact there was only terrible weakness. The man she had married had been a figment of her desperate imagination. But most of all it had been John’s doing. He had lured her in carefully, and she believed there had been real calculation in this. He had seen her, and he had seen what he could make her; he had seen so much further than Katrina herself. But if she had been deceived, it was only because she had wanted to be deceived.