I’m about to leave the room when I notice an iron handle next to the edge of a painting of a large stone building with a pointed roof and a square tower on one side. Without the windows, it might be a dark rocket, waiting for lift-off.

I move the painting to one side and see a small wooden door with a sloping top set into the wall. I pull it open, find myself staring into a little cupboard, nowhere near big enough to hide a man of Aidan’s size. I’m about to close the door when I spot something on the floor. A framed picture, face-down, with a printed label on the back.

I pull it out and nearly laugh with relief when I see that the name on the back isn’t Darville. It’s a woman’s name: Martha Wyers. I’m on the point of shoving the picture back in the cupboard when something stops me.

I turn it over, then drop it a second later, as if it’s burned my skin. It falls at my feet, picture-side up and I stare, horrified. A noise escapes from my lips. I feel as if I’ve lost all control over my life, as if I’ve been set down at the centre of somebody else’s carefully orchestrated nightmare, and am being pushed further in, a little bit at a time.

I’m looking at a painting of a woman with a rope knotted round her neck. It’s the most horrible thing I’ve ever seen. It isn’t a dead body, only the image of one, but it makes no difference. Mary is too good a painter. I am in the presence of Martha Wyers, whoever she is. Was.

I can see everything: the texture of the rope, the frayed parts. How it has cut into her flesh. The bulging eyes, the purple-grey hollows beneath them, the thick protruding tongue, livid bruises on the skin around her mouth, a white, crusty ridge along her lower lip . . .

I smell smoke. Closer than before. Mary.

‘I see you’ve found Martha,’ she says.

The hardest thing I’ve ever had to do was get through the court case, with Her staring at me as if she wanted to lunge across the court and gouge out my eyes, and Him determinedly looking down at his lap so that he wouldn’t see my face. Forcing myself to go to Mary Trelease’s house for the first time was the second hardest.