It won’t have taken you long to see the problem with that theory: it was too simple. Mary hadn’t gone to the police, not so far. She couldn’t have—the police had shown no interest in you. I didn’t go to them either, after what you told me in London, not straight away. And I loved you: you could see I loved you. You could feel it. You started to hope that maybe it wasn’t an act, maybe I was telling the truth. Was it a test, sending me to her house for the painting? If I was innocent, if I wasn’t conspiring with her against you, then surely I wouldn’t be able to get my hands on it—was that what you thought? When I came back with Abberton, what did you think then? That it all seemed a bit too easy: the artist who’d refused to sell me her painting suddenly decides to give it to me as a gift? Even then, you couldn’t bring yourself to believe I was on her side, because you loved me.

Was it revenge you had in mind at first? Do what she’d done to you? Did you want to get your hands on her picture so that you could obliterate it? Or did you only want to see it? You hadn’t known she was a painter until I told you. Did you want to see her work, see what it was like? Whether she was any good? Did you fantasise about killing her when you heard she’d called her painting Abberton? She was taunting you. You knew that, Mary being Mary—being Martha—she’d see it through to the end, that Abberton would be followed by Blandford, Darville , Elstow and the rest: the buyers who’d never existed and never bought your work, named after the boarding houses at her school.