‘It’s best like this.’

‘And it’ll make a difference?’

He read a couple of the handwritten signs on the wall. Brunch rolls and carrot cake, plus a few breakfast items. This was the kind of area where people could afford to have breakfast out. It reminded him of Lyon. Breakfast out? What kind of home do you have, that you want to eat breakfast somewhere else?

Then again, what kind of home did he have?

No time for that, not now.

A woman came over.

‘I’m good,’ he said with all the curtness of someone who’s had a sleepless night and lost a double murderer.

She moved away without a word.

For a while they sat there without speaking.

In front of her was an empty coffee cup, plus a small stainless-steel dish with the remains of a serving of white ice cream, now melted. She stirred it with the spoon. There was a deliberateness in the way she did so, a deeply feminine charm that made it seem incomprehensible that she’d killed two fit, able-bodied, young men.

Yet she had.

‘I thought I’d go on the run. I’ve been living off the adrenalin for a week. High as a kite! The getaway was good, you’ll give me that, no?’

‘Planned to precision.’

‘Not that much planning, to be honest.’

‘But why? Why escape like that?’

‘I don’t know. To show you I could? To show you how random it all is, everything?’

‘You really thought you’d become a fugitive from justice?’

‘I haven’t been thinking at all. Not really. But I have been remembering things. The man who killed Thomas? I can remember his barrister in court. He was wearing a little wig. The terrible odds, he said. One in a million. This awful tragedy. The sound of his words was like being punched in the face, again and again, until it no longer hurt, until you didn’t care if it stopped or not.’

Joe recalled the report of the trial. The very thought of reading it made him feel sick. One-sixty-six? Depends who the one is… All night long he’d tried to convince himself that a kind of madness had compelled her to commit murder, something from the unfathomable depths of human despair. Yet over the course of the night he’d come to understand her actions more and more clearly.

‘Why now?’ he said. ‘After all these years?’

She shifted in her seat, raised her eyebrows a little.

‘Do it, he was saying. Make it right.’

‘Who was saying it?’

‘I didn’t know. Not at the time. It wasn’t until last night, when it was all over, that I realized. It was Thomas, his voice, telling me that something needed to be done. For everybody. Everybody else. Make it right.’

‘Voices in your head, Chris. Save that thought, eh? For later?’

She seemed flattered.

‘You don’t have to do this.’