Aidan knew he couldn’t shake you off. That was one lesson you didn’t have to teach him. It’s why he went to the police and confessed, as soon as he saw I was planning to involve them. Thinking about it, I’m sure he followed me that day. I told him I was going to the dentist, but I’m a poor liar. He was right not to trust me. He’d confided in me and I betrayed him. Not straight away, but eventually, when the uncertainty became too much for me. He’d been convinced I would, ever since our night in London—it was only a matter of time. And when the time came, he was ready with his official confession. It was the only way he could keep control of the situation.

He as good as sent the police straight to your house, Mary, to see if you’d tell them. If you were going to ruin his life again, he wanted you to get it over with. He was trying to force your hand. You could easily have told Waterhouse or Charlie Zailer the truth: that your name used to be Martha Wyers, that Mary Trelease was the name of a woman Aidan had killed. You could have told them about the painting in his exhibition, The Murder of Mary Trelease.

What was in that picture, Mary? I know you remember. How annoyed you must have been when you found out from your private detective about Mary Trelease’s death. You’d had, in that painting, evidence of Aidan’s crime—had it and destroyed it. How good was it, as proof? What story did the picture tell? I’m surprised you didn’t have a stab at recreating it yourself, since by that point you’d started your new life as a painter. You must have remembered it detail for detail. Did you do a sketch of it and put it somewhere safe, so that you wouldn’t forget what you’d seen and what you knew?

No answers come. No one can hear the questions going round in my head.

What was in the picture, Aidan? Nothing obvious. You’d only have risked calling it The Murder of Mary Trelease if it wasn’t too much of a giveaway. It can’t have been a painting of you strangling her in which you were recognisable as the killer—people like Jan Garner and Saul Hansard would have asked questions. So what was it?