‘So you deliberately killed him,’ Joe says flatly. Frannie drops her head. Cathy is saying nothing, her brow crumpled, looking like somebody approaching forty for the first time ever.

‘There was no cigarette, at the market?’ Cathy says eventually.

‘No. I saw him there and we rowed. And then when he called to say he was coming – I think he’d been out, in a bar – I went out to meet him, somewhere neutral – I didn’t want him in the villa around Paul – I wanted to try and … to try and talk him down.’

‘And then what?’

Frannie heaves a sigh, a long, sad sigh that seems to go on and on. Several Lego figures sit on her kitchen table, and she reaches over and messes with one, passing it from hand to hand. ‘He said he would be able to get full custody of Paul,’ she says in a soft voice. ‘Because I hadn’t negotiated with him over the years. Because I’d tried to limit access to his child. It sounded like it might be bullshit, but I didn’t know. You just don’t take the risk – not with your kid. I’d just always said I’d let him see Paul when we were over, but that’s all. Each July.’

‘What was he like?’ Joe says quietly.

‘He was just so … so forceful. So powerful, you know? He would. Not. Let. It. Go.’ Frannie rubs at her eyes as she says it. ‘Every morning, some days, there would be a new email. I tried everything.’

‘Why didn’t you say anything? Ever?’ Cathy says.

‘Oh, God, imagine, imagine the receptionist telling the vets,’ Frannie cries. ‘It’s all so fucking unsavoury. Joe and Lydia are married and trying for a baby. You’re happily single.’ Cathy sniffs, not looking at either of them. ‘It’s so – I don’t know. I felt like a fucking EastEnders character with problems with the one-night-stand dad.’

Joe blinks a few times, shaking his head and looking around him. At Frannie’s American-style fridge, a huge space-grey one with an ice dispenser in the front. Her luminous green garden beyond the bi-fold doors. Her huge table, the sheepskin rug draped stylishly over the bench. How are they here? In the most middle-class of kitchens, speaking of murders, of threats, bribes, burying bodies. It all seems so insalubrious, suddenly, that he wants to walk out of this kitchen, leave her house and get straight in his shower. Scrub it all off.

‘So basically,’ Cathy says, her voice unusually loud and clear in Frannie’s kitchen. ‘You let us –’

‘We have almost no time, then, do we?’ Joe says. ‘The body will be found soon, but there’s a … there’s a paper trail.’ Cathy throws him a look which tells him that she’s had the exact same thought. ‘Isn’t there?’

‘You let us,’ Cathy says slowly, ‘you let us take risks we didn’t know we were taking. We thought he was somebody random. Not somebody connected to you through the fucking courts. God, Frannie.’