‘Oh.’ The bed dips with Joe’s weight as he sits down next to her.

Lydia keeps reading. ‘He lived near here,’ she says looking up at Joe. ‘He was a policeman, apparently. An Italian policeman but half British.’ Joe is completely still next to her, as though she hasn’t even spoken, likely not even listening.

Maybe the test was wrong. It was too early. Not enough HCG in her system yet. She calculates it. It’s possible. It’s just possible. Hope ignites for Lydia. Yes. She hasn’t yet had her period – due sometime today but still not here. She may yet be a mother. She might already be a mother, she thinks, wondering if sperm has met egg, after all.

‘Do you think I should do another test – tomorrow?’ Lydia says, putting down her phone. ‘I know I sound mad,’ she adds, expecting him to laugh, to indulge her as he usually does.

‘I don’t know,’ Joe says tightly. He reaches for her phone and reads the news article. Typical Joe. He can’t engage with difficult topics except about animals and his bloody sisters.

No, she’s just jealous, Lydia tells herself. Stop being petty. They are not more deserving of their beautiful, cohesive family unit than her. It is just luck, just bad luck.

‘I haven’t had my period yet,’ she says, but that makes him stare at her phone even more intently.

‘I can’t believe about that policeman,’ he says.

‘I know.’

‘It’s too hot in here,’ Joe says, opening a window. He leans over Lydia to do it, and she breathes him in. But, for just a second, she sees the Joe the rest of the world sees. Caustic, difficult. Not her Joe, interior Joe, soft as butter. Usually.

19.

Joe

Joe hears Cathy sigh through her nose. ‘A policeman,’ she says. The three of them have locked themselves in the main bathroom in a panic, hiding from Lydia.

The bathroom is hideous – truly, enough to give you nightmares, but not enough to make you renovate it when it’s hot outside. A monstrous white bath tub with three stairs leading up to it. The sort of bath you’d have an orgy in. Beige stone tiles everywhere, up the walls, up the steps to the bath, across the ceiling …

‘It shouldn’t matter,’ Frannie says from her position on the bottom bath step. She is fiddling with an expensive glass bottle of bath oil, taking the cap on and off. Joe wishes she wouldn’t, feels like a teacher with a fidgeting student. Every time she does so, the room is filled with the cloying scent of roses. Her gaze is fixed in the middle distance as she does it, and he wishes she would concentrate.

Lydia isn’t pregnant. Lydia isn’t pregnant. She retreated into the toilet, came out pale-faced and wan. Her period had arrived. Amazing how much that fact still bothers him, even in this mad, surreal, murderous context.

He and his sisters have been in the bathroom, discussing the fact that William was a policeman, and getting their stories straight. According to the news, local police in Verona are going to begin interviewing any potential eyewitnesses this afternoon. Joe had wondered why it was so fast, and now he knows: they haven’t killed a civilian. They have killed a fucking cop.