‘Mine were about him.’ Cathy bites her lip and looks to her left.

‘What about him?’ Joe says.

But that is as far as Cathy is willing to go. She shrugs, biting at the edge of her thumbnail, and doesn’t answer.

He glances over at Paul as he thinks it and wonders if, when it finally comes out, Lydia will look back on this holiday and be able to pinpoint the day. The day he stopped sleeping. The day everything changed. Would she forgive him? For the initial act, and then for the secrecy? He skews his mouth to the side as he ponders it. Yes and no, he decides. Lydia is tidy in both a physical and a mental way. If people piss her off, they’re gone. She could forgive a crime but not a lie. She’s not only estranged from all of her family but from several friends too, a direct result of her childhood.

Cathy’s body language changes. She stiffens. ‘There are eight police now, in the foyer,’ she says, her brown eyes searching over Joe’s shoulder. ‘Don’t look.’

‘How can I not look?’ Joe says, wanting to turn around.

‘You said about the market, didn’t you?’ Cathy asks quietly. ‘I’ve been meaning to ask.’ She turns the pancake. Everything about her body language is a study in nonchalance, weight on one hip, but Joe knows her well enough to spot where the edges aren’t quite sanded down. Her shoulders are a millimetre higher than normal.

‘No,’ Joe says, shocked. ‘I didn’t.’ He blushes with the shame of it, a micro-betrayal already. But who wouldn’t try to protect themselves in the situation he finds himself in?

‘What?’ she says. ‘You didn’t say about the market, to the police. That Frannie saw Will?’

‘No?’ Joe says again, not offering an explanation.

‘Why not?’

‘I just figured it was better to omit everything.’

‘But I said you were there, Joe.’

Joe goes cold. ‘I didn’t think. What do we do? Do we clarify it?’

‘No,’ Cathy hisses, drumming her fingers against her lips. ‘Okay – you didn’t actually see him at the market, did you?’ she says. ‘Just – from afar?’

‘No, he was pretty close to me.’

‘Joe.’

‘Right – I see. Okay. No. No, I didn’t see him.’

‘So if they ask – which they won’t’ – she looks at him sharply – ‘we say that.’

The feeling of his t-shirt being too tight again descends on Joe. He’s lied to the police and now he has hidden his true motivation from his sister, and she, altruistic Cathy, is trying to get him out of it.

She stares at him, saying nothing. He wonders if she knows, if she knows he tried to extricate himself from the blame in the interview room. She has so much power over him. She could call up the police, right now, and say, My brother lied. The vulnerability of each of them strikes him. Adrenaline begins pumping. What the fuck’s happening to him?