I shut my eyes and think about London, when Aidan’s behaviour towards me changed. Whenever a friend succeeds, something in me dies. He’d written that in a card to Martha Wyers, after she sent him a copy of her published novel. Did he set Mary up for a fall because he was jealous of her talent as a painter? I wish he was telling me the story instead of Mary, to help me understand why he did what he did.

‘I came back here,’ she says quietly. ‘The door was open. I called his name—nothing. So I started looking. I found him in here. On the floor next to him was a pile—like that one, except smaller. I had no idea what it was. It just looked like a mess, although I could see little familiar things, colours and shapes I recognised, but I didn’t grasp the truth until Aidan told me straight out.’

She starts to walk slowly around the mound of detritus. ‘He was so proud of his plan to destroy me—he described it as “genius”. There was no exhibition, never had been. No one in London had seen my work. Aidan took my paintings—I let him take them—and he destroyed them one by one. Thanks to my trip to London and my lack of self-control, I found out early. He’d been planning this . . .’ She kicks the heap and lets out a low groan that startles me, as if the pain inside her has a voice of its own, deeper and more raw than hers. ‘Planning my surprise for the end of the exhibition, when I’d have been expecting a cheque from the gallery.’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, understanding at last why she doesn’t sell her work, why she keeps it all in her home and entrusts it to no one.

‘I stood where you’re standing now, sobbing, begging him to tell me why. He said he had another surprise for me. It was an exhibition sales list—not the one he’d given me already, the one he’d faked, but a real one, from his exhibition at TiqTaq. The names, Abberton and co? They were Aidan’s buyers. Not mine, never mine. All the people I’d imagined loved my work—all along it was Aidan’s work they loved.’

‘The paintings,’ I say, more to myself than to Mary. ‘Outlines of people with no faces—because they weren’t real.’ That’s how Aidan knew, how he could predict the series, what Mary would call the eight paintings that followed Abberton.

‘The ones who bought Aidan’s paintings were real enough, I suppose,’ she says, off-hand.

‘Why? Why would he do something like that?’