The blood on their skin and clothes looks even worse in the daylight. ‘We’ll have to throw everything we’re wearing away,’ she says quietly.

Frannie nods. ‘We can go in the back way,’ she says.

Cathy can’t wait to shower. To slough off the dirt and blood and the history of it from her skin, the steam warm and wet in her lungs as she breathes it in. And then she can’t wait to work, to forget the world around her, to lose herself in admin.

But, first, they must make sure this is sorted, covered up.

The clothes. The blood. The car. Alibis. CCTV. DNA. Forensics. It seems so endless to Cathy, walking next to her siblings, their faces squinting into the sun.

She turns her mind to the first thing. Because this isn’t over. It’s actually just beginning. This is the first day, in a whole lifetime of lies.

10.

Lydia

Lydia has become crazy about – of all things – the precise meaning of first-morning urine. That is her first thought as Paul wakes her up. He does it in exactly the way Frannie said he would when she briefed her and Joe. ‘More an angry, hungry shout than a cry,’ she had said drily. It had been one time – of many – when Lydia had wanted to be like Frannie. A single mother, still seeming to enjoy parenthood. Still wry. Still groomed, glossy, the same as all of the Plants. Dark hair, skin that tans easily, unusually bright eyes.

It’s 5.55 in the morning. So does this count as first-morning? Or is it still the night? What exactly is the idea behind first-morning urine anyway?

Lydia has been pleasantly surprised to find that – unlike the art of conception – looking after a two-year-old overnight has been quite simple. Paul hadn’t woken up at all and now, as she looks at him standing indignantly upright in the cot, he’s thoughtful, his face a perfect facsimile of Joe’s. It would be so easy to pretend for a second that he is theirs, but Lydia doesn’t want to. Doesn’t want to muddy the future with fantasies.

Paul smiles to himself, as he often does, as if remembering something deep in the past that made him laugh. She has noticed this week that he has an actual formed personality, something she wasn’t sure most toddlers had. He pretends he is a dinosaur when he eats. Broccoli because brachiosauruses ate from trees. Fish fingers because spinosauruses ate fish. He knows a handful of words, and almost all of them are the names of dinosaurs. ‘He can’t say yes but he can say velociraptor,’ Frannie said yesterday in a restaurant, while they all laughed.

Lydia picks him up and holds him to her hip, his soft bare feet dangling down and hitting her thighs. Hazy from sleep, she turns towards the bed, in the dimness from the heavy curtains, and squints. Where’s Joe?

She changes Paul’s nappy while he gazes up at her, completely trusting. His thighs are cold and cushiony, delightful, the texture of a blancmange. Lydia presses a finger into his calf, watching the perfectly smooth skin yield and release. One day she might have one of these, she finds herself thinking, as though he is an object or coveted possession. She hopes her baby is as nice as Paul.