Tommy nodded and continued to stir the mushrooms. Malcolm thought this signalled the end of the exchange—conversations seemed to stop and start abruptly with Tommy, frightening topics looming up out of nowhere and then vanishing almost as quickly as they came—but then Tommy said, “I’ve thought this whole time that it was my father I wanted to ask you about. But now I think that isn’t true. Maybe it’s my mother.”

Carefully, Malcolm said, “What do you want to know?”

Tommy was stirring more vigorously now. He said, “What she was like, I suppose. I mean, I remember what she was like to me. Most of the time, I remember. But how did she seem to other people?”

Malcolm would not have found this an easy question to answer about anyone, but least of all, perhaps, about Katrina.

“She was . . .”

And there was Katrina before him.

“She seems nice,” Heather had said after they first met her. “And very beautiful, of course. But is she a bit . . . ?”

“What?” Malcolm had said.

“I don’t know. Bland?”

Malcolm was surprised at this; it wasn’t like Heather to be hard on people. He didn’t remember how he’d replied. He’d found Katrina reserved, but not bland. He thought there was plenty going on beneath the surface. And later, of course, Heather and Katrina became friends. He’d hear them laughing together in the next room, or talking in low voices.

“What do you talk about?” he’d ask Heather.

“Oh, nothing really,” she’d say. “Just nonsense.”

Malcolm never reminded Heather of her earlier comment about Katrina, though he was curious to know at what point his wife’s opinion had changed, and how she judged Katrina’s character now. But perhaps, he thought, Heather wouldn’t have been able to answer, would not really have understood the question. She liked people, but she didn’t tend to think much about them when they weren’t in front of her; she didn’t go in for “plumbing their depths” as she said Malcolm did, making this comment with both fondness and bemusement. Heather had no use for their depths.

Like the rest of them, Heather had known little about Katrina’s marriage. Malcolm had seen from her shock after the murders that Heather had been no more aware of what might have gone on than anybody else. And how Heather had blamed herself.

But perhaps Katrina had a hardness in her, too. No good making her out to be a saint, because nobody was. She had absorbed so much from other people, who poured out their secrets to her (“Thank you for listening to me,” Malcolm would hear them say to her down by the harbour, or on the road outside the school); but Katrina offered so little of herself in return. Was this selflessness, as you might assume, or was it miserliness? Later, Malcolm thought it might have been self-preservation.