Her voice was dreamy. It reminded me of Greg talking about Azra, that day in Dorset with the harebells dancing.

‘It wasn’t even hugely sexual, if that’s what you’re thinking,’ Johanna said. ‘Oh, we had sex—sorry about that—but that was just an added delight. Part of the mix. And we never felt guilty because it was all so inevitable.’ She laughed. ‘Basically, we’re both fantasists.’

It turned out she was a child psychologist and had trained in Holland. Though she was Dutch I could hardly detect an accent. At one point she’d worked with young offenders in a high-security unit. She’d met Calvin through Doug, when they started up the business together.

‘Have you been visiting him in prison?’ I couldn’t call Calvin by his name. ‘Are you going to forgive him for what he did? Will you be there for him when he comes out?’

She shook her head. ‘I’m as shocked as you are. I could take the cheating, I could match him at that, lie for lie, but I do draw the line at premeditated murder.’

‘So how did he get found out?’

‘Because the business went bankrupt, back in June, and Doug discovered that Cal had been swindling him. He’d been taking money out and forging Doug’s signature. And when Doug started ferreting around he discovered some emails between me and Cal and realised we’d been having an affair, so the whole thing blew up, big time. They’d been best friends, for Christ’s sake! Our marriage was pretty well dead by then but this was the last straw and we had one hell of a row and I moved out.’ She sat up and pulled a cigarette case from her pocket. ‘Want a puff?’ She pointed to the silver case. ‘This was my grandfather’s. It saved his life in the trenches. That dent was where a bullet would have hit him.’

The joints lay neatly in a row. There was something touching about them—the care with which they’d been rolled and assembled; their cosy nestling together like confidantes. They reminded me of Pam’s coconut fingers. For some reason my eyes filled with tears. For those young men in the trenches, the ones unable to be saved from a bullet; for the children and grandchildren they never had; for the children disappeared from the playground, leaving just the nitrous oxide bullets scattered on the grass. Where had they all gone?