Jason has one of his feet up on the chair next to him now, and he rubs at his eyes while yawning, not covering his mouth. I like this about him, this intimacy, this earthiness. Like he doesn’t care at all how well I get to know him. He has no boundaries. Most people treat me like a leper, so it’s nice. That’s all.

‘Why didn’t you confess sooner?’ he says, changing the subject, and asking the first truly barbed question he’s asked me. ‘It seems there were a lot of opportunities.’

‘Because I only felt I could … when we reached the point of no return.’

‘Which was?’ Jason clicks his pen.

‘In the outhouse. At the bottom of our gardens.’

Part III

PERVERTING THE COURSE OF JUSTICE

22.

Then

Joe

The Verona Police Headquarters is a brown-stone building right in the centre of the city. A blue Polizia car is sitting outside it when they approach.

Inside, the station has sea-green carpets and smells of cigarettes and coffee, even in the bathroom, where Joe currently stands, in a panic. The interview is conducted by a prosecutor, not a police officer. This has rattled Joe, who has asked to use the toilet.

He is staring at his reflection in a cracked mirror above a grey ceramic sink. Isn’t it seven years of bad luck if you smash a mirror?

If he thinks of Frannie, he can see her features shifting underneath his, like one has been traced from the other. They used to share a bathroom and get ready together on Saturday nights. They’d narrate their outfit choices, the way they were doing their hair, their faces side by side in the mirror. They called it their Saturday Show. Cathy thought it was ridiculous.

Joe reaches out to run a finger over the length of the crack. It’s jagged, the broken glass rugged terrain underneath his skin. Maybe one day, he thinks, looking at himself, index finger looming large in the mirror, he will forget today. This sink. This crack. Surely, in a year, maybe two, they will all forget, they will all relax.

He meets his eyes in the mirror, then looks away. He leaves the mirror, the crack, the bad luck behind him.

‘So,’ the prosecutor Matteo – Matt – says to Joe. ‘Can you answer our questions?’

The room is old-fashioned. A meeting suite that looks more like an office. A dark-wood desk in the corner with red felting stitched into it. A table in the centre with two cheap plastic chairs. A tape recorder whirring next to them. This man is a lawyer for the state. Should Joe get his own? Or would that say more than anything about his guilt?

He meet’s Matt’s eyes. They’re a pale, ashy kind of brown, the colour of driftwood. He has a square-shaped face, an upturned nose like a child’s. Maybe early forties.

‘That’s fine,’ Joe says. ‘Happy to. But I don’t know how much help I can be.’