I snap the Bible shut and put it back where I found it. Ever since I’d met up with Catherine again, she’s gone out of her way to help me and be kind to me, and here I am, snooping around in her private things. I’m so nosy, I should be ashamed of myself.

I’m on the verge of leaving when I catch sight of the little art book that used to live on a shelf in the Dawsons’ living room. Memories of Alice and me flicking through the pictures come flooding back, and I can’t resist having a quick look before I go. I perch on the end of the bed while I leaf through its well-thumbed pages.

I stop at Balthus’s Girl with Cat, remembering how Alice and I used to call it the Pedophile’s Pic. I look at the girl in the picture. Her hands are clasped behind her head as she sprawls, suggestively, on a chair, one leg bent on a stool in front of her, the other on the floor, her inner thighs and white underwear on display. Something about the expression on her face reminds me a little of Catherine this morning when she looked at Ross, and of what she might have looked like as a young girl.

What was it Mum told me on the phone? That she and Dad disapproved of how Catherine used to hang around with boys on the estate. “She was very…precocious.” Those were Mum’s words. Is that why her Nanny Dot bought her a Bible? I wonder. Because she thought her granddaughter needed some spiritual guidance?

A horrible thought comes into my head. Maybe there’s more to Ross’s uptight behavior than simple awkwardness at sharing his home with a colleague. A cold feeling washes through me and I can’t believe I haven’t even considered it before, or maybe I have, subconsciously at least. Maybe he fancies her. That would certainly account for his awkwardness whenever she’s around and his reaction when I told him I’d offered her a room. Of course he wouldn’t want her living with us if he was having an affair with her, or planning on one.

Now that I come to think of it, wasn’t he always bringing her up in conversation before the party? The new practice nurse this, the new practice nurse that. And it was Catherine who accompanied him on that home visit I didn’t know about till he came home late. Catherine who ate chicken and chips with him. Where did they eat it? I wonder. In his car? No, Ross would never allow someone to eat a takeaway in his beloved car.