‘There was nothing we could’ve done that would’ve been right – or easy,’ Joe says. The sky behind him is luminescent. The smell of roses, somewhere, drifts towards them on the breeze. Cathy wishes for a second that this was a normal late August, just a mundane partnership meeting. She’d enjoy the smell of those roses. But they must live their August, their descent into criminality, their family crisis playing out in front of them like some Mafia movie.

As Cathy idles in neutral on the way home, Macca in the boot, Radio 4 playing softly, she remembers those goosebumps, and something repeats on her. Something … something sinister. Some moment in that meeting. She can’t recall it. Maybe it is just the fact that Evan was there. A non-Plant, for the first ever time. Knowing what they had collectively done.

It is only later, at midnight, that Cathy realizes. She feels too keyed up, as ever, to relax, and is carrying an armful of wet washing up her stairs, the sheets and shirts making her arms cold.

It isn’t general fear or concern. It is something Evan said. Something that seemed to Cathy like a veiled threat, or at the very least a hint at his mind-set. Why wouldn’t you get the most out of a situation? he’d said.

Anxiety flashes up Cathy’s body. She drops the clothes on the stairs and sits a step beneath them, trying to think. No, he just meant … no. She can’t think it. Can’t even think that he would blackmail them again. And again and again, until it’s over.

58.

Now

First Day of Trial R. v. Plant

‘We wanted to fix the mess we were in,’ I say, shrugging helplessly in the witness box, under oath. I wonder if they will document this shrug in the courtroom transcript the stenographer is painstakingly tapping out. ‘We were desperate. As time went on, we had less and less to lose.’

‘Are you saying that it … that it was easier to commit a crime because you already had committed others?’

Right before it all blew up, Frannie had become about as thin as it’s possible for an adult to be without being hospitalized. Gone was the beauty. What was left was a shaky frame on which her old, gorgeous features used to hang. Her hair had lost its thickness, exposing more of her hairline, like after she had Paul and she grew back a fuzz that she had hated. There was no fat in her cheeks. Her skin used to crease when she smiled. We met on that final night in the outhouse in the back of Frannie’s garden. There was no wine, but everything else was the same. The same ritualistic feel of our old Friday nights, only this time it was made sinister.

An owl was out, hooting softly nearby. It was the last time I saw both of them, before the police.

I stare at Joe. He staunchly refuses to meet my gaze.