The one-bedroom serviced apartment came with job-lot chipboard furniture, a two-seater sofa covered in prickly grey fabric, angled towards the small TV sitting on a wood-grain laminate unit, and on the walls a couple of framed prints of lovely coastal views you couldn’t see from the apartment. The place was good enough.

She needed to buy food—she hadn’t eaten on the drive down south and it was now seven thirty in the evening.

By the time she drove to the main street, the IGA supermarket was twenty minutes from closing, so she hurried down the aisles with a basket in hand, grabbing tea, milk, eggs, bread, chocolate and the best she could find in the limp selection of fruit and vegetables. Because it was so late, there were only a few other customers in the place, which was a relief.

Unpacking her groceries onto the checkout counter, Paula exchanged a smile with the young woman on the till. Since the night she killed John Santino, she’d developed a way of smiling at strangers, conducting the unavoidable conversations with people, speaking to patients, all without truly connecting. It was a trick: she would aim her gaze at an object slightly to one side so the person’s face remained out of focus. That way she never felt she made direct eye contact with anyone. She couldn’t bear the idea that people would properly look at her, see who she was, see what she’d done.

Paula looked like a regular human to the young woman on the checkout, presumably, but she could no longer be a regular person. She imagined herself as one of those plastinated cadavers sometimes used to teach anatomy—once-living bodies with muscles, ligaments, circulatory systems, internal organs from which all the fluids had been extracted and replaced with silicone and polymers. They looked astonishingly normal and alive even though they were dehydrated, preserved in plastic.

While the checkout woman rang up the groceries, Paula half closed her eyes against the caustic glare of the fluorescent lights, but then a flash of colour, something red, caught her attention.

A small boy in a red T-shirt was darting back and forth between the drinks fridge and the confectionery display. He was five years old or thereabouts, grinning and cavorting like a naughty elf while a teenage girl tried to scoop him in with her free hand. In her other hand, she was holding a basket with a loaf of white bread and two cartons of UHT milk.

‘No way you’re getting fizzy drink, mister,’ the girl said to him. ‘We talked about that.’

The little boy dropped his head back and let out a groan of despair so tragic it made Paula smile to herself. But then, undaunted, he spun away from the fridge back to the rack of chocolate bars near the till, so fast that Paula had to duck sideways.