She munched glumly on the lasagne before pushing the plate away, her mood souring. No telly. No Internet. She had her phone, and the mobile data on that at least . . . but who wanted to watch a programme on a tiny screen? It would give her a headache within two minutes, even with her reading glasses on. So what was she supposed to do now?

It was at times like this – few and far between, admittedly – that she found herself missing Rich. Thirty-three years had ticked by since he’d died, but he still sometimes appeared in her head, frozen in time with his favourite checked shirt and corduroy trousers, his tufty brown hair and that calm way he had of dealing with a problem. ‘Let’s see what we can do here then,’ he would have said, had he been with her now. Give him a screwdriver, tuck a pencil behind his ear and he’d be away, whistling cheerfully between his teeth as he tackled whatever new practical test lay ahead. Alison was quite sure that many of his shelves and bookcases would still be standing, back in their old house in Wolverhampton; ditto the shed he’d put together one Sunday afternoon, lengths of wood all over the lawn like a gigantic timber jigsaw. That huge workbench he’d built in the garage, too: sturdy as anything. It would take a meteorite to blast through the roof to destroy that. The evenings he’d spent there, happily tinkering with his beloved vintage car – a red Jensen Interceptor that he was doing up – it had been his idea of bliss, quite frankly.

Not that Alison liked to think about the garage at their old house for long, obviously. You couldn’t dwell on these things. But the memory poked insidiously at her, regardless: how she’d woken up on that still, soundless Sunday morning to find his half of the bed empty; how she’d felt that throat-tightening impulse of dread, strong enough to send her tiptoeing past Robyn’s bedroom and downstairs. Rich had lost his job as foreman of a building site three months earlier, after being wrongly accused of theft, and he hadn’t been the same since. Down she’d padded to the kitchen, where a note lay propped up beside the kettle: I’m sorry. And she’d seen the door ajar between the utility room and the garage, and she’d dashed through uselessly to find . . .

The bitter smell of turps. The soft speckles of sawdust on the workbench. And that grotesque creaking of a rope, twisting slightly from the rafter as her husband’s body dangled, limp and unresponsive. She had staggered away as if punch-drunk, knocking over a box of Rawlplugs, her mouth open in a silent scream of horror. No. No!