Maybe we’d buy a vicarage in Suffolk, the church’s shadow falling across the lawn. French windows, the curtains billowing in the breeze, a new Border collie dozing in a pool of sunshine, Calvin tinkering with something in his shed. Was he a shed man? I hadn’t a clue …

How about a cottage in the Welsh Marches? We’d walk along Offa’s Dyke, faces flayed by the wind, and come home to teacakes, our dog Beryl—a bitch this time!—lying panting on the hearthrug. My books on the shelves; Calvin didn’t have many so all the more room for mine. A vegetable garden, of course. Maybe hens?

These scenarios flared into focus, stuttered and faded, like a dodgy connection. After all, I hardly knew this man. I’d seldom met his friends. He was unknown to me and yet, in some visceral sense, utterly familiar. It was thrilling that we would live together; I just had trouble picturing it. Would we marry? Maybe we’d elope to France in one of his helicopters and land in that village in Brittany where Azra bought her bedsheets. We’d live in a house with a cider orchard. We’d eat warm baguettes and spend the afternoons in bed.

I must have slept at some point, because it all became jumbled up and then dissolved into dreams. I seemed to hear Calvin in his shed, hammering at a piece of wood … I was in Suffolk … in France … Then I stirred awake and realised it was the rain, hammering on the roof … but loud, so loud … it must be hailstones.

Someone was hammering at the front door.

‘Calvin!’ I shook him awake and jumped out of bed. Grabbing a dressing gown, I ran downstairs. The clock said five thirty.

I opened the door. Two policemen stood there. I knew then that Max had died. Why not Lucy? A mother’s instinct; I just knew. My son had no sense of direction. He’d got lost in the desert and died of thirst.

The policemen, however, were looking over my shoulder. I turned round. Calvin was approaching, his bare feet noiseless on the marble. As he walked, he knotted the belt of his bathrobe, the white towelling one from the St Regis Hotel. Maybe they’d found out he’d nicked it.

‘Are you Mr Calvin Fox?’

He nodded.

The policeman cleared his throat and said: ‘I am arresting you on suspicion of the murder of your wife, Mrs Angela Fox. You do not have to say anything, but it may harm your defence if you do not mention when questioned something you later rely on in court. Anything you say may be given in evidence.’

Part Three

Part Three

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