Once the cigarette was smoked down to the butt (the beef, they’d called it in the squat, passing the soggy ends of joints around), she would stub it out on a stone that she would then throw into the sea, to rinse away the sooty scar. Then she would cradle it in her palm and walk it along the beach, find a good spot to bury it. The final part of the ritual was to slowly strip down to her bikini, wrapping her various layers together and weighting them with stones on the beach, and inch into the sea. It was difficult under foot at first, with the violence of the waves and the pebbles slapping in riot, but once she’d made it to chest-height, she launched herself in, turned in a circle and lay on her back, cricking her neck slowly down, relaxing into it. She imagined the cold salt water licking away at the smell of the smoke, at the chemical residue on her skin. She lay back, spread her arms and legs like a cross, allowed the waves to take her hair. She squinted at the sky. This was the part where she unclenched, allowed her real life to ebb back in. All the choices that she had made – good, positive choices – to get her to this point, to this place, filling her slow, easy life with health and sunshine and love and peace –

– and Clio’s face, that twisted tiny half-smile tensing at the jaw, came back into her head and blocked out the sun.

‘Got it all right here, haven’t you? Mind you, you were never exactly struggling.’

They’d reconnected on Facebook, which was something Xanthe was ambivalent about anyway but kept up as her main line to Dido. She was surprised, mostly because her crusty former pals were generally too suspicious of online surveillance to use it, and Clio had always erred on the side of paranoid, even in that company. The click had come through just after the hullabaloo surrounding the Carrington case had wound down – a little red notification from the past. Expecting another burst of hostility, she had braced. But nothing, for three years.

Xanthe had kept her distance from the case, but she still ordered the English-language newspapers in from the nearest tourist town and followed the online coverage. CLIO ACCUSES TOP COP OF UNDERCOVER SEX SHENANIGANS.

The headlines made it ridiculous, of course. They had wanted her to testify, but she and Nikolas had talked through this. It wasn’t that she was denying her past, more that she was at peace with it, and whatever other people had done during it.

‘Bourgeois bitch, intcha,’ Gaz spat at her, over Skype. ‘Always looking out for your own interests, you was.’ A long swim in the sea, her body suspended in the water, just a tiny floating thing in the mass of the blue, got rid of that one.