‘Okay, so, you were all worried you would be – found out?’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘It was a bit of that. But it was mostly the threat of the body being found, and what would be found, that made it unravel.’

‘And why was that?’ the barrister says, his tone a perfectly pitched curious. He’s an actor. He knows the answer to this question. Everything is at stake for me, and nothing for him. I am a real victim caught at a murder-mystery party, and nobody will believe me about the danger. I take another big breath and steady my shaking hands in the witness box. ‘Ms Plant,’ the barrister says. ‘I have to remind you that you are under oath.’

‘Yes,’ I say. ‘I know. I know.’

‘Well?’

I glance at the jury again. Roughly half men and half women. Glazed expressions. ‘It was what we did in response to the fear,’ I say.

‘Who?’

‘Me, Frannie and Joe.’

I’m sure I sense a frisson as I say Frannie’s name in court.

‘So in what ways did the fear motivate you all?’ the barrister says. A simple question. I wonder how much the jury knows about what happened next. Is it true that they can’t have read the news about us? Or is that an American rule? Do they know that it wasn’t the police who got to us, in the end? It was ourselves.

53.

Then

Lydia

Lydia is sitting in her back garden, smoking, looking up at the dark windows of Cathy’s and Frannie’s houses. She hasn’t smoked for years, but she found Joe’s roll-ups. She needs to think, and something about cigarettes aids that process. The quiet, the breathing, the night air. An owl hoots nearby, and she looks up at it, thinking.

Where is she in all this? That is what her old therapist would ask her. Where are you in all this, Lydia?

It’s a valid question, Lydia thinks, staring at the seam where the cigarette meets the ash. It’s lit up bright red like a wound in the night, everything else in darkness.

Has he considered her? Did he think of her, when he agreed to do it? Lydia frowns as she asks herself the tough questions, as she has been taught to do. Where is she in all this? The Plants are top, clearly. And then her? She can only hope for second.

Joe arrives home. She hears the door, then watches the house light up, window by window, as he looks for her. Eventually, he arrives in the garden.

He smells of the vets’. The twist of antiseptic lingers on his clothes. It is rendered sinister, tonight.

‘You’re smoking,’ he says, a question in his voice. He’s rubbed the gel out of his hair, making it fluffy and matt-looking. It must have been a bad day.

‘Yes,’ she says, not wanting to discuss that, not wanting to let him distract her. ‘Can I ask you something?’ she says.

He sits down opposite her on a wooden patio chair. He’s facing her; she’s facing the house. He’s left all the lights on in the downstairs, one on in the upstairs too; an advent calendar of their life.