Saul said he’d told Mary, seconds after I’d fled the gallery, that he wouldn’t be framing for her any more. He’d told me this before, in one of the many messages he’d left on my voicemail since that day in June, but it seemed important to him to say it again. ‘I know,’ I said. ‘Thank you.’

‘She’s a scary woman, Ruth. I don’t need to tell you that.’

A panicky sensation started to flicker inside me. Our conversation was dragging me back to the past, the last place I wanted to go. ‘I won’t tell Mary I got the address from you,’ I said. ‘Please, Saul. It’s important.’

He agreed in the end, as I had known he would. Then he couldn’t find it, and told me he would have to dig it out later. When he phoned back that evening, Aidan was there, watching me from across the room as I wrote it down.

‘Well?’ he said.

I could have explained that I’d contacted Saul and asked for Mary’s address, but I didn’t. We’d got into the habit of saying the bare minimum. Fewer words seemed to mean less pain. ‘Fifteen Megson Crescent,’ I said. ‘Spilling.’

Aidan’s face stiffened into a mask of shock. ‘The same house,’ he murmured. Something had blown open inside his head; some new horror had seized him. He stormed out of the room. I heard him crying in the hall as if he’d collapsed there, unable to get any further, and pressed my hands over my ears, feeling utterly helpless, thinking: the same as what—the house where he killed Mary?

Dead people didn’t move house . . . Was 15 Megson Crescent where Mary had lived when Aidan knew her? Where he had killed her? But she wasn’t dead. No matter how I tried to think about it, from whichever direction I approached it, nothing made sense.

The next day, I didn’t need to tell Aidan why I wasn’t going to work with him. I looked up the route in my A-Z and set off to the Winstanley estate. Impossible as it is to see the future, sometimes you can feel its presence ahead of you, dark and cloying, waiting to swallow you up. My face started to itch as I drove, the skin to feel tight as it had when Mary had sprayed me with red paint. I twisted the rear-view mirror towards me to check there was nothing there, although rationally I knew that my face would look perfectly ordinary. Red paint couldn’t reappear once it was washed off; it could hardly seep up through my pores and spill out after so many months.

I stood in Mary’s untended front yard, my whole body a screaming knot of tension, and knocked on the door. When she opened it and saw me, she let out a loud breath and looked at me with some emotion on her face that I couldn’t identify. ‘Ruth Bussey,’ she said slowly. ‘Come to inspect my hovel and feel superior. ’