He’d read it, he decided. But she’d never know he knew. He’d read it because he wanted to know the name of the boy Alicia was in love with, but when she brought him home for lunch or dinner or whatever, he’d put on his best surprised face. He’d read it, but it would be an act of love, not betrayal. It would be no worse than the times he’d left Christmas gifts at the end of her bed, or stolen her baby-teeth from under her pillow. It was just one of those deceptions you had to practice as a parent. It was an act of loving espionage.

His thoughts neatly marshalled, he opened the cover and began to read.

The clock ticked and ticked, one tick per second. You counted the intervals with elephants – he’d learned that at school. Ellen had been taught hippopotamuses, but with hippos you had to be quick. How long would Alicia be? He had to open up. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t serve beer and snacks and the occasional rewarmed meal. He had to, it was his job. When you were the landlord you opened when you wanted to hide in a cupboard and never come out, you opened when you felt like you were dying, you opened when you wanted to kill someone.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick. A loud one then a quiet one, loud and then quiet, the electric mechanism weighing out the seconds. Loud. Quiet. Loud. Quiet.

How long would she be? He wanted to sit and wait but he couldn’t. He had to keep their lives going. Was that where he’d gone wrong? Had he been too focused on the pub, on the busy successful summer they’d just had? Was that how he’d fallen down on the job, failed so miserably as a parent that he hadn’t seen this awful thing that had been happening to his daughter?

(How would he kill him? So many ways to kill him.)

A quarter to eleven now. He should be downstairs. He’d left the vacuum in the middle of the floor, the carpet half-cleaned. The pumps weren’t switched on. Perhaps he could ask Mattie to come in. No, he couldn’t. They were well into the lean months now. He needed to hoard his money, not fritter it away.

(Who was it? Who? How could he find out?)

But was it frittering? Alicia was his world. His job was to put her first. Oh God, the guilt, the guilt of not seeing what was happening. The clock ticked and ticked. How could she sleep with that noise? The thought he’d had a hundred times, distilled into a simpler thought; how could she sleep? How could he? How could he have lain senselessly in the room next to hers, quietly confident that he was doing an acceptable job at this parenting business, while his daughter tumbled into hell?

(Where could he hide the body? The threat he’d made to Finn. Who was it? Who?)