“Why serial killer? Women give babies up for adoption all the time.” Not very long ago, the home secretary’s wife had been confronted with the son whom she had given up for adoption forty years ago. “Do you think Pauline Prescott allowed herself to—”

“When I miscarried all those times, when Artemio was finally born, didn’t you think—”

“No.” Gillem’s lying. In fact, he’d thought Kate’s miscarriages were divine punishment for the child he’d abandoned, but that’s just the kind of sick bastard he is.

“You didn’t think of how it might have been for this woman, going through pregnancy, giving birth all by herself, with no husband? She must have been young.”

“Look, do you want to know the truth? I felt taken advantage of. If a girl wants a baby and doesn’t tell you that’s what she’s after—There’s—there’s an unspoken agreement nowadays—there’s the pill, there’s birth control, it’s meant, you know, AIDS aside, we can sleep around all we like, that women can be as carefree, as it were, as men. It’s true I didn’t ask, Are you protected, because we weren’t teenagers, I assumed she—”

“Because it would have been inconvenient for you to stop halfway and put on a condom.”

Gillem looks down at his hands. He is miserable. Kate is miserable. And because he’s the one who’s made them both miserable, he’s being obliged to talk about things he doesn’t know how to talk about. He clears his throat.

“She didn’t tell me she was operating by other rules. She had this sort of groupie thing going, she wanted my child,” he explains, wearily. “I don’t mean that in a big-headed way, but here we were, rich foreigners renting a holiday house in this tiny village, Mummy was still getting her picture in the papers, not always for the most salubrious reasons. This girl and her friends had been following my mother around all summer; she knew all sorts of things about her. If she had this hidden agenda, if she’d decided she wanted to get pregnant by an utter stranger, well then, it was her look-out.”

“Well, she certainly miscalculated, didn’t she, poor girl? I do find everything you are saying utterly baffling, Gill. Cold, paranoid, self-pitying. Very well, forget the mother—gold-digging star-fucking stalker. What about the child?”

“If she didn’t want to give her child a father—”

“What about the child?” Kate repeats.

“I pay child support. That’s what I owe the child. If you choose to make procreation something utterly unilateral, non-consensual, that’s what you’re left with—a biological father whose connection to his offspring is about as profound as a snake’s or a—”

“And you’re willing to be the snake.”

“No. I wasn’t willing. I was furious, I was sick about it.”