‘Who did you kill?’ I said softly, looking into her eyes, which were dry and oddly vacant, as though she had been completely emptied out.

She gave a heavy sigh.

‘I think I’d better start at the beginning,’ she said.

She began to speak. As the light faded outside the window, I understood how little I really knew her.

His name was Michael Copeland and he was the brother of another man, Liam, who she had gone out with for a time at Cambridge. She said, ‘It was mainly a physical relationship. I’m sorry. I know that’s not the sort of thing you really want to hear, but there it is. It was about getting off our heads and then, well … you get the picture.’

I did. In high definition.

She said it fizzled out after a while and that Liam ‘wasn’t the important person in this story’. He buggered off somewhere and there was a rumour he got on the wrong side of someone in his shady circle. Anya said, with an attempt at humour, ‘We’ve both watched enough Scandi crime, haven’t we, to fill in the blanks?’

Anyway, it was his brother – a real slimeball, according to Anya – who then became obsessed with her. He did really creepy things like turning up to her college with gifts, which went from being stuff like chocolate and perfume to more sinister dead roses. Her mum and dad got a restraining order in the end but the stress became too much, making her leave Cambridge and take a year out before going to Durham.

In truth, much as it was hurting me to think of Anya going through all this, an insistent voice in my mind kept whispering, ‘But why am I only learning this now?’

Finally, as she was telling me about some of the letters he used to write to her, I blurted out, ‘I think you need to tell me what you mean by “I killed him”.’

She stopped speaking then and wrung her hands in her lap. It was a strange gesture I had never seen her make before. I knew my wife’s stress habits as well as I knew my own: the way she would bite on the side of her little finger or twist her hair at the root. This hand-wringing thing looked oddly mannered, but I dismissed the ungracious thought as quickly as it came to me.

‘I’m getting to it!’ she exclaimed. ‘Let me tell you in my own way, okay?’

‘Okay! But get to the point!’

‘This is hard, Ell!’

I raised my palms in supplication. ‘I said, okay!’

So Michael Copeland had turned up again.