I told her what Anya had told me, that Michael had tracked her down and been harassing her. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever had to say. Each word against her son seemed to strike her, so I began to wonder whether this was immensely cruel of me to be doing this.

But she had to know. And she had to be misdirected from the way it ended.

‘… I think,’ I said, ‘and I’m so so sorry to have to say these difficult things to you, that when Michael finally began to accept that Anya has her own life – has me – and that she was never really interested in him … I think that was what led him to take his own life.’

She stared at me, her lip trembling, and she hurriedly put her cup and saucer onto the table with a clatter and pulled out a tissue.

‘But where is Liam then?’ she said, voice shaking. ‘Where did he go?’

I opened and closed my mouth uselessly for a second before I found my words.

‘I don’t know, Mrs Copeland. I don’t know and neither does Anya. She was just a casual girlfriend of his but she—’ I bit off the end of the sentence. How much pain could I pile on this poor woman? But she noticed, leaning forwards in her seat.

‘What?’ she said. ‘Tell me.’

‘This isn’t easy to say.’

She slammed her hand against her knee with such force that I flinched. ‘For God’s sake,’ she said, ‘do you not think I’ve had time to already think the worst? It has been fifteen years!’

Breathing heavily now, she closed her eyes for a moment and then levelled them on me, calmer now.

‘Right,’ I said hurriedly, ‘right, of course.’ I swallowed. This was one of the strangest conversations I’d ever had. The smell of lavender seemed to be filling my nose now and the patterned walls were closing in. I wanted to get out of here.

‘Well, I don’t know if you were aware that Liam had been …’ God, this was hard to say to her face ‘… been supplying drugs to students at the university?’

Evidently, she wasn’t. Her face sort of crumpled and she pulled a man-sized tissue from a box under the coffee table and buried her face in it.

‘Mrs Copeland?’ I said. ‘Are you alright?’ I contemplated getting up and putting an arm around her before thinking about how inappropriate that would be.

But it was horrible to see her distress. I wished I could have told her the whole truth now, about how Michael had been trying to hurt Anya and how he had fallen to his death. That had to stay secret though. Better, surely, to think her son had been depressed, than that he had been potentially a rapist, or worse?