What you said to me at the workshop after Waterhouse and Charlie Zailer left, about seeing the future: that if you hadn’t killed Mary Trelease already then maybe you were going to—was that the threat Mary took it for? Did you want me to tell her you’d called her a bitch and said she should get out of Spilling, go somewhere you wouldn’t find her? No, it was more than that, even if that was part of it. Waterhouse had just told me how the real Mary Trelease died—strangled, naked, in a bed. You never wanted me to know the terrible details of what you’d done. I think that was the moment you realised: if I stuck around, if we stayed together, I’d end up finding out the whole truth. You wanted to protect me. You knew I’d be terrified if you started talking about seeing the future—you wanted to drive me away so that I wouldn’t be sullied by you or your past crime. And maybe you wanted to frighten me because you were angry, too. I didn’t trust you enough to tell you the full truth about so many things. I told you I went to the police, but I didn’t mention that it was Charlie Zailer I’d spoken to, the woman whose face is all over my bedroom wall. I never told you why I stopped working for Saul, not really.

You didn’t need to try to scare Mary, if that was your intention. She was afraid of you anyway, obsessively so. She called the police to Garstead Cottage regularly, made them check you weren’t hiding in there, waiting to take your revenge. She couldn’t believe retribution wasn’t lying in wait for her, couldn’t conceive of a world in which a person might get away with a crime as serious as hers. She doesn’t care two hoots about what she did to Gemma Crowther—that, in her eyes, was justice. It’s what she did to your paintings that she can’t bear. That’s why she can’t stand to hear me say the nine names, why my asking ‘Who’s Abberton?’ at Saul’s gallery had the effect on her that it did.

At the art fair, at your insistence, I described the picture I’d seen on TiqTaq’s stand: the outline of a person, not recognisable as male or female, stuffed with what looked like scraps of painted cloth. Pieces of your pictures: that’s what she used to fill in the human form. Did you want me to get Abberton for you to prove I wasn’t lying about having seen it, or because it had those pieces in it and you wanted your pictures back, even in shreds? Maybe both. I think you wanted to have the scraps of your work rather than let her keep them.

I hear another bone-splitting crunch.