She shifts against him, moving her body underneath his arm, which clamps around her, like they’re out to sea and he’s rescuing her. She stays like that, half sitting, half lying, for several minutes.

There’s a noise outside. She flinches immediately against Tom, as though her body knows before her mind does that it’s all over. The living room takes on a strange tone. It’s lit up blue. Sirens. They’re coming. They’re here.

‘Will they be lenient with me?’ she asks Tom, who puts his hand on her shoulder. She leans her cheek down on it. It could have been really good, being with him, she thinks. It could have been perfect.

She blinks at him. The sirens are loud now, surely on her street, the living room a blaze of blue and white, flashing on and off, on and off.

She steps away from him.

He leads her into the hallway and reaches for the door handle for her. The sirens are so loud. ‘You’ve done the right thing,’ he says, but, already, the noise of the sirens is filling the house. Police cars and ambulances.

‘It’s not – it’s not – I’m sorry.’

The sirens strobe in the night.

Tom draws his mouth together in a tight line. And then his eyes meet hers. Sad eyes, like he knows something, can see something that she can’t, that she doesn’t understand. He raises his shoulders, just a fraction of a centimetre. If a stranger did it, she wouldn’t know what it meant, but she knows him, her Tom. The half-smile, the shoulders. A sad parting of ways.

She turns off the light in the hallway and stands there for a few seconds, her house bathed in police-blue, like an aquarium.

‘Stand down,’ she hears a tinny voice say outside. Cathy feels nothing. Not guilt at the betrayal of her family, not fear of her imminent arrest for her role in everything, not regret for everything that happened in Verona, and afterwards. Cathy feels nothing. Absolutely nothing.

‘Show yourself,’ the police say, and Cathy knows she should cooperate, but then she thinks of everything that’s happened since Verona, every desperate action, every lie, and she thinks that all is lost except this moment, with Tom still in her kitchen, for only a few minutes more. So, instead, Cathy watches them creep further and further towards her, like a slow, incoming tide that will eventually reach her and drown her but not quite yet. Not quite yet. She reaches for him. They still have a minute together. Maybe two.

71.

Cathy

Cathy isn’t handcuffed. Nobody pushes her head down into the back of the police car. Instead, she is read the caution, and then ignored, driven to Perry Barr Police Station, somewhere she has heard of but not ever been to, until now.

A separate police car came for Joe. An ambulance for Evan, though it was obviously futile. Cathy will never forget the sight of Joe, bloodied and mad, his eyes bright and feverish, in the outhouse as he pleaded with her.