‘Me, frame Aidan? He’s a murderer—a cold, calculating murderer. He strangled a woman—he told you so himself and you were too stupid to listen.’

Martha’s right: you wanted to know if Gemma Crowther was sorry for what she’d done to me, if she’d changed. You can’t change unless you face up to what you’ve done. That’s what you tried to do in London, at the Drummond Hotel. Maybe you’d have succeeded if I’d given you the support you needed instead of letting you down.

You wanted Gemma to show you she’d changed so that you could believe that sort of change was possible. If she could redeem herself, so could you. You must have wondered about Martha, too. Yes. That’s why you told her about Gemma, about wanting to see if she regretted what she’d done. Did you hope Martha would apologise for the terrible thing she’d done to you, even while she had a gun pointed at your face? Yes. I know the way a victim’s mind works, being one myself. You can accept that someone has damaged you beyond repair, and maybe that they will again. What you can’t accept is a total absence of regret.

Martha didn’t say she was sorry. Of course she didn’t. Did you know then that you were better than her? Or did you start to wonder if anyone, any human being, was any good at all? Maybe you were as bad as Martha and Gemma—a killer who hadn’t had the guts to face up to his crime, who’d let someone else take the blame. Did you say whatever you needed to say after that to make Martha shoot you? Was it a relief when she did?

‘Which woman did Aidan kill?’ Waterhouse’s voice swims under the surface of my consciousness. ‘Mary? You said he killed a woman. Which woman?’

‘Me! He killed me!’

‘Simon!’ A third voice. Not mine. A woman’s. I have to open my eyes again. When I do, I see Waterhouse turning, Charlie Zailer at the window, Mary lunging for the gun. No . . .

She’s got them both now, the gun and the hammer, one in each hand. There’s something wrong with the way she’s holding the hammer.

‘Bussey’s alive, Seed’s dead,’ Waterhouse says.

I breathe in, breathe out. I think to myself that I ought to stop if I want to die. Suicide: a sin. Does it count if all you do is stop breathing, when breathing’s so hard? If there’s a God, does he have a view on that?

‘Aidan’s not dead,’ Mary says quickly. ‘If he were dead, I’d be dead, and I’m not.’

‘Put the gun and hammer down, Mary,’ Charlie Zailer says. ‘There’s an ambulance outside. This has to stop now.’

‘Aidan’s not dead! Check.’