Head down again. Matty swam, too fast, back to the mud, back to Shifty, before Rosa’s words had any chance to form.

***

No one had found her for two and a half weeks. Eventually, the postman had alerted the local council to a bad smell. Cue yellow tape and neighbours loitering with looks that were curious and delightedly horrified. The police had kept the details to a minimum, but it was easy enough to imagine. Matty knew what a decomposing corpse looked like – there’d been enough grisly images over the years to look at alongside drowning victims, for comparison.

It would have been quicker than in water. Rosa might have been lying on the sofa, an arm stretched out towards the carpet. Hair, which had never changed in length, partly squashed underneath her, the rest hanging down. Dried blood-foam on her lips. Bruised, grey skin, the blood cells having pressed out to every edge. A stifling smell, like pondweed in the sun. Underneath her clothes, the points of her pelvis and her ribs beginning to be visible. And next to her, a bottle of Cointreau and an empty tub of pills.

She would have wanted to be glamorous in death. She’d have imagined a big studio light over her, or the light from the half-opened curtains giving her a fixed, waxen pallor. Probably put lipstick on specially, her best knickers and bra, lacy and matching, for the coroner.

It was just like her, really, to kill herself. The ultimate way of saying, See what you did to me?