‘I want to understand.’

‘A rightness. The feeling that it was absolutely right.’

‘Like maths?’

She nodded.

‘Do you understand? As a parent, perhaps? It felt like the end point of everything, the culmination of all those years…’

As he listened, he tried to assess her state of mind. She was lucid, but her eyes were wandering, untethered, as if she was searching for something.

‘…Damian, my ex-husband, he went to the States. Threw himself into his work. Did well. Very well. He’s in private consulting now, lives in Cayman. Every six months or so he rings me, late at night for him, evening for me, so it’s all right. He’s always so drunk he can hardly speak. He asks how I’m doing, y’know. Then he cries. Says he’s scared, that he wants to go out and kill Neil Barden. Or someone like him. One of the evil ones.’

She stopped. Pursed her lips, staring at him in that quizzical way she had, as though weighing up some trivial but intriguing conundrum.

‘Do you want anything to eat?’

‘No, I’m fine, thanks.’

‘I’ll just finish this,’ she said, taking a spoonful of her melted ice cream, then another. ‘The last chance I’ll get!’

‘For a while.’

‘For a while!’ She liked that. ‘It took me a few years to work Damian out. He wasn’t scared that he might kill someone. He was ashamed, because he knew that he’d never kill anyone. What he couldn’t bear was the shame.’

‘And you? How did you bear it, any of it?’

‘By doing the best I could. New career, trying to help people, to make a difference.’

‘So what changed?’

‘Someone took me.’

‘Took?’

‘Took me out of the fiction I’d created. I felt myself being carried along that road, the road where Thomas died. Have you…?’

‘Yes, I was there just now.’

‘I was transported there. To that very spot. And I saw the truth. The truth of the world. It’s simpler than you could imagine, Joe. Opposite angles. You remember trigonometry? When you show kids that, their eyes light up. It’s so obvious! So perfect!’

He closed his eyes. Found no explanation here, no way of resolving this.

‘No,’ he said, placing his hand firmly onto the table. ‘That only explains Craig Shaw. I can understand that. You were there. The strangeness of the moment. After all those years of suffering. But Jason Beverage?’

Her eyes widened.

‘Joe, are you coaching me for a trial?’

‘Please. I want to know.’

He sat there, hardly daring to look at her, and waited to hear if she had anything else to say. One long, long Romano pause.

‘I was terrified, but compelled.’

‘Excited?’

‘No. But I knew I would go on. I’ll go down as a calculated killer. That’s fine.’