Pharaoh had hidden her eyes behind dark glasses. Her fingers were bare of jewellery, the nails a gaudy red. There were no flowers on the casket lid but she’d placed a bottle of Jamaican rum into the coffin before they nailed him in. The funeral directors had been wrong in thinking it was a tender gesture. She told McAvoy she would have rather used lighter fluid. Said that if she could have afforded a proper burial she’d have filled his coffin with sex toys, just so that archaeologists of the future would know he was a wanker too.

Should have done it years ago, she’d said, as the coffin disappeared behind the drapes. Seems wrong that we had to wait until he died.

McAvoy had struggled to know what to feel. Anders had been a bastard. Charming, gregarious – but still a bully. He’d hurt Pharaoh. Hurt their kids. Run up huge debts and lost the family home. Got into business with some very bad people, then succumbed to the blissful insensibility of a brain aneurysm just when she needed him the most. Pharaoh stuck with him. Nursed him. Fed him, bathed him, clothed him. Climbed the ranks and got enough money together for a little place in Grimsby. Moved him into the garage. Paid for his care and for the equipment that enabled him to make some attempts at communication. She gave him her best years. Anders never got better. He started suffering seizures a few months back. Couldn’t be left alone. Pharaoh couldn’t afford round-the-clock nursing and had refused all talk of a hospice. The girls took it in turns to sit with him, monitor him, read to him. He died in October, aged fifty-one. There would be no headstone, and his ashes were scattered in the car park. Pharaoh drove over them on the way out. Dropped her girls off with her mum and went to drink to the bastard’s memory. Nine hours later she called McAvoy from Cleethorpes beach, drunk out of her mind. He’d never heard her cry before. Never heard her feel sorry for herself. Never heard her so unsure what to do next. He’d stayed on the phone throughout her long walk home. Listened as she unburdened herself. Told him what Anders had done to her. What he was capable of. How frightened she had been of him and how that fear remained even after he was incapacitated. It had been like talking to a stranger. He hadn’t known whether to offer sympathy or vindication; to tell her she had done the right thing. In the end he had simply listened. It was easier than talking. He could never disguise the sound of tears in his own voice.

‘About a mile, I think,’ she says, squinting at her phone and tutting at the sporadic network coverage this far east of civilization. ‘Wish I’d have known we were going to be underwater. I’d have insisted you wear trunks. Still, that’s a problem easily solved. I should imagine a spot of skinny dipping would be rather bracing. You first.’