‘I’d like to talk again about Danny Shaw.’ Joe hesitated. This was more sensitive, but he wanted to broach it while he had Hannah to himself. ‘There’s a collage on his wall. His mother said you gave it to him. It sounds as if there was more between you than the fact that you went out together a few times. Karen says you were his first love, that he never quite got over you.’

She stooped again to pull out more weeds, avoiding his eye.

‘I fancied myself in love with him for a while. I gave him the picture while I was still a little bit besotted.’

‘What went wrong?’

‘Nothing really. I hooked up with Simon and saw that Danny was basically a bit of a prat.’

‘So you dumped Danny for Simon? That wasn’t the impression you gave yesterday.’

‘Wasn’t it?’ She smiled. ‘I don’t know. All that stuff seems so important when you’re going through it, but later it hardly seems to matter. This is a small place. There aren’t that many people of our age. You tend to have been out with most of the available boys by the time you hit seventeen. It’s like one of those Scottish country dances. Change your partner when the music stops. In the end we just all become good friends.’

Joe supposed that was true. It had been the same for him. He’d been out with a couple of his wife’s friends before hooking up with her; one had been to dinner at their house with her husband the week before. Teenage passion soon faded.

He wanted to ask Hannah if she’d slept with Danny, if they’d been that close, but resisted. His reluctance was more a matter of knowing the question would have seemed ridiculous to her than of not wanting to pry.

‘Was Danny upset? You said yesterday he emailed and phoned you after you dumped him. Did he make a nuisance of himself?’

She shrugged. ‘Nah. He soon got over it. He started going out with his new lass in freshers’ week, so he can’t have been that heart-broken.’

She pushed the wheelbarrow to the end of the garden and lifted the weeds onto the compost heap. ‘Is that all you wanted to know? I don’t think I’ve been much help.’

‘Did Simon ever talk to you about Patrick?’ Joe hadn’t meant to ask her about the dead brother, but he thought it was important: the child drowning, the effect on the adult Simon.

‘Of course.’ She wiped a stray hair away from her face and left a streak of mud. ‘We tell each other everything.’

‘What did he say?’