Ten days. I made her promise again she wouldn’t ring that number. I had ten days when at least she wouldn’t be sleeping in our house. And after that I’d have to get her over to London where I could explain things to her in person and put together some kind of plan. What then? I hadn’t a clue. If she left the house she couldn’t return to live with Mary and Sam, not after how much she had come to enjoy her life in Belfast. It would be like shoving her back into a living tomb. Maybe she would have to come and stay with me in London.

I had a sudden, horrifying vision of Phyllis and me twenty years hence, living together as the odd couple – Eve having long since vanished – with me as one of those middle-aged men, neutered by duty, who wears his clothes too neatly pressed and can never ask a woman back to his tiny flat because his elderly aunt is always pottering about, watering house plants and snuffing out erotic possibility. It’s strange how saving someone from a living tomb so often seems to involve climbing into one yourself.

It didn’t matter, I told myself. I could deal with that later. Just the business of now mattered. Something about the erratic, panicky way I had begun to weigh up risks and decisions told me that I might not easily get through another tragedy in which my inaction played a part. I needed to buy some thinking time. Before the week was out I’d sort out someone to mind the shop and then send Phyllis a ticket to London for a surprise holiday when her stint at Julie’s was up. The idea would thrill her, a picturesque treat, a story to tell her friends.

In the meantime I rang the head office of Speedy Snaps in Northern Ireland to check whether they had indeed written to their customers to offer compensation. They had no idea what I was talking about. Regarding the fire in the Belfast branch, they said, they were still in the very early stages of working out what had been destroyed. They hadn’t yet tried to contact any customers at all.

McGee had known I’d hear about the incident and the letter. He was clever that way. I don’t think he thought that my photos of him really were in Speedy Snaps waiting to be developed, if he even believed in their existence. He’d just torched the place as a signal that he was ready to do anything. The letter was to remind me that he knew where Phyllis lived.

I thought about Eve all the time, too: what she was doing, if she was thinking about me, whether Raymond missed me, whether he played Monopoly with anyone else now or if the board just lay untouched in the corner.