I led Anya through to our bedroom and helped her to get onto the bed, then pulled down the blind. She was shivering, and I put a fleece blanket over her.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘you lie down for a bit and we’ll talk later, okay?’

I was walking out of the room when she said, ‘Ells,’ in a small voice.

‘Yeah?’

Her face looked very pale in the late afternoon light edging the blackout blind.

‘You know I had no choice, don’t you?’

‘Yes, of course,’ I said, a bit too fast. ‘Have a bit of kip now, okay? I’ll see you in a while.’

I gently closed the bedroom door and went back downstairs.

For the next hour I busied myself with tidying up the house, which was looking dirty and unloved.

Once the house was a bit more like home, I made vegetable soup from stuff in the freezer. I figured it might be something Anya could eat if she was feeling fragile, plus my body felt so wrecked and unhealthy after recent sleepless nights and too much drinking that I wished I could just take some vitamins intravenously.

As I stirred the lentils and vegetables around in gentle circles I thought about what I had seen on the doorstep.

It worried me that Michael had shared his Anya connection with other people. She’d had no choice to do what she did, but she should have told the police.

And there was something else too.

Ever since that terrible sequence of events back when I was a kid, I had an overly developed conscience when it came to old ladies. It was as though smiling at them in Tesco, or helping them get out of parking spaces, would somehow make up for the evil I had brought about. Utter bullshit, obviously. Nothing could make up for that.

I shouldn’t forget this woman’s son terrorized my wife, I told myself. There are plenty of mothers like that: refusing to acknowledge they’ve given birth to a monster.

The fact that we still hadn’t spoken about Anya’s revelation pressed down on me and I found myself impatient for her to get up again and come downstairs.

Another half hour or so later I heard the thump and gurgle of the water pipes that signified she was taking a shower.

After a little while she came into the kitchen, wearing just my tatty Breaking Bad T-shirt. It was too big for me and came down to the top of her thighs. Her wet hair was in a ponytail high on her head and her face looked scrubbed and fresh.