Pain burns all the way through me. There’s a bullet inside me, metal in my body. I saw it coming towards me, too fast for me to move. I’m lying on the floor. I reach out for Aidan’s hand, but he’s too far away.

‘You’re a . . . good liar,’ I manage to say. ‘You’re Martha.’

‘No. Martha died. Her heart stopped. Her mind stopped. You can’t die and be the same person afterwards. I’m one of the few people alive who knows that’s not possible.’

‘Abberton . . . the names . . .’ I try to raise my head, to look down at my body, but it hurts too much. I can’t move and think at the same time, and I have to think.

‘What about them? What about the names?’

‘Aidan didn’t destroy your . . . paintings. You did it to him. You bought . . .’ I can’t go on.

She looks down at me. I feel light; not a person any more but a weightless flow of pain. My mind starts to hum; it would be easy to fall into that comforting sound, allow it to roll me away. ‘He did it,’ Mary insists. ‘He took all my pictures and he cut them to pieces.’

‘No.’ I gasp for air. ‘The names . . . boarding houses . . .’

‘No!’ Mary raises her voice. ‘I’d never do that. He did it. He did it to me.’

‘You bought his pictures using those names.’ Each breath is a struggle, but without the struggle there would be nothing, no energy to stay alive. ‘You . . . made him come here . . .’ My mind fills with words that would take too much effort to say. He didn’t want to see you again, but you bribed him: fifty grand for a commission. ‘He stopped painting because of what you did.’

Scenes from the story Mary told me drift back into my mind. One half true, the other half lies. The cottage door left open, as she said. Aidan walking in, looking for her. Finding her standing on the dining table with a rope round her neck, his ruined paintings on the floor in front of her. Did she tell him what she’d done and then jump? Two shocks for him, locked together in one moment for devastating impact. That’s why he couldn’t move at first, why he didn’t rush to save her life. He was traumatised, paralysed.

‘My gardens.’ Every word wrings sweat from me. ‘Not Aidan. You did it. One last summer, to punish me for . . . Saul’s gallery. I frightened you. You hate not . . . being in control.’ The second after Charlie Zailer spoke to you on Monday and told you I was Aidan’s girlfriend. You’d given me Abberton as a gift, without knowing: another loss of control. Another punishment.

‘What about your dead boyfriend?’ says Mary impatiently, leaning over me. ‘What about what he did?’