“Freya found out I’d been stealing things,” he said. “She’s been blackmailing me.”

“You . . .” Vicky trailed off and Chris imagined her glancing around her ward, checking who was eavesdropping. Her voice dipped: “Found out you’d been stealing?”

“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.” Chris continued to speak cautiously but clearly, for the benefit of his guard. “I’d been taking things from my learners, just bits and bobs, small tokens . . .”

Vicky fell silent. Perhaps she was utterly confused, or perhaps she was beginning to realize what he was trying to tell her: Let me do this for you.

What he really wanted to say was that he understood why she’d always felt the need to steal. From the other kids in her care home; from her flatmates at nursing college; now from the patients on her ward. He understood her desire for trinkets of other people’s lives, knew she’d grown up feeling that nothing in the world belonged to her. But he couldn’t articulate any of that right now. All he could do was try to put the message across: He would never betray her, no matter how strained things had become between them.

“I’d been keeping the stuff in my car,” Chris said, still hoping she was reading between the lines. “I was going to get rid of it all, or even give it back to the people it came from, if I could. But Freya saw it and took her chance to get some money out of me.”

“You were keeping them,” Vicky murmured, and Chris knew his meaning was sinking in. The things he’d found in their bedroom, the things he’d immediately known she had stolen, which would lose Vicky her nursing license if anybody discovered them . . . He’d panicked and shoved them all into his glove box. And that was what Freya had discovered. Even the pillbox, which Freya had seen as confirmation of his thefts, had been a kind of confirmation for Chris, too. He knew Jess’s cousin had had a brief spell on Vicky’s old ward, having her tonsils out.

“They think you did something to Freya?” Vicky asked. “Because of that?”

“I’m a suspect.”

“Oh, God—”

“It’s going to be okay. Don’t worry.”

“How can I not worry? You’re in there because of—”

“Time’s up,” the officer barked from behind.

“I’ve got to go,” he told Vicky.

There was another pause, during which Chris hunched protectively over the receiver, as though he could stop the policeman wrestling it from him.

“I’ll come and pick you up,” Vicky blurted. “When they let you out, I’ll be there.”

Chris smiled again, and saw the officer shoot him a look, as if to say, What the hell have you got to be cheerful about?

“That would be good,” Chris whispered down the phone.

“Chris . . . thank you,” she said. “And I’m sorry.”