Then why did you wait for Charlie Zailer outside the police station?

‘They’d have caught up with me eventually. They always do. I couldn’t stand the waiting, so I went to them.’

‘So did I,’ I blurt out. He can’t be angry, not when he’s done the same thing.

‘You went to the police?’

I could tell him I waited for Charlie Zailer, but I don’t. It would feel too much like confessing to an illicit attachment.

Aidan smiles, his eyes gleaming the way they always do when anger or some other emotion overpowers him. ‘You believe me,’ he says. ‘Finally. You believe I killed her.’

‘No!’

‘Yes. You wouldn’t have gone to the police otherwise.’

‘I don’t. I don’t! Aidan, what’s going on?’ I sob. ‘How could I believe you killed her when I’ve seen her with my own eyes, alive and well?’

He doesn’t answer.

‘What did the police say?’

‘The same as you. I had a visit yesterday from a detective, Simon Waterhouse . . .’

‘Yesterday? You mean here, a detective came here?’ While I was at the workshop trying to do the work of two people alone, looking in every hiding place I could think of for Mary’s picture. ‘I thought you were in Manchester yesterday.’

A long pause. Then Aidan says, ‘Don’t try to catch me out, Ruth.’ He makes no attempt to reconcile what he’s telling me now with his earlier lie.

I know I ought to let it go, but I can’t. ‘Where’s the painting? What have you done with it? Where did you spend last night? At Mary’s?’

His face pales, freezes. ‘You think I could go there even if I tried? I’d wipe that shit-hole off the face of the earth if it was up to me.’

I couldn’t go there either. Last night, when Aidan didn’t come back, after I’d been to the workshop and not found him there, and waited and waited, I decided I had to go to Megson Crescent again. At two thirty in the morning I got into my car, using the heel of my wounded foot to work the clutch, and told myself I had to drive to Mary’s. I’d done it before, and anything you’ve done once you can do again. But I couldn’t. When I turned on to Seeber Street and saw the Winstanley estate’s mesh-fenced play-ground in front of me, the decades-old paint peeling off the swing, slide and roundabout, my good foot slammed down on the brake. I had to turn round and drive home. However infinitesimal the chance, I couldn’t risk finding Aidan at Mary’s house. I couldn’t have stood it.

‘Why would I go back to the place where I killed her?’ he demands, his face crumpling in pain. ‘Why would I?’

‘But . . . didn’t this detective tell you she isn’t dead? Didn’t he see her, speak to her?’ I ask, feeling my hold on the situation start to unravel. I’ve felt this way so often lately, I’ve almost forgotten there’s any other way to feel.