He’d felt sick since then, pacing his flat, unable to settle himself for longer than a few minutes, before the thrumming of his body compelled him to his feet and he set off once more, round and round the flat. He’d made beans and toast, convinced himself he was hungry and then thought he’d vomit with the first mouthful.

Alice would be alone. That was the heart of it for him, the thought he could not get beyond. He’d managed from to dissociate himself from the reality of a man’s death by not thinking about the man as a person, by creating some sense that his death would be the corollary for Danny’s. Seeing the doll, the child, had made the man a father, a figure incrementally more real than the faceless officer he’d been up until that point. But now he had a name, Hamilton, and a child, Alice, and a connection to Tony that could not easily be dismissed.

Alice would be left on her own.

Tony could not help but see Karen in the girl: bereft of a father through the violence of someone she did not know, would never meet again; set on a path that led inexorably to this, to targeting others, to becoming a killer herself. Death begetting death, spiralling from one to the next, an unending chain of cause and effect.

His father had been right, he reflected. What good would revenge do? What would the child do without even her father? OK, he wasn’t great at the day-to-day stuff, but Tony guessed he was doing his best, widowed, suffering himself from all he had witnessed in the North, trying to raise a young girl in a strange country. He was empathising with the man, sympathising with his position, all the time making him more real, more concrete in Tony’s consciousness. And, ultimately, what right had he to deprive Alice of a father, fate having already taken her mother from her.

He allowed himself to fixate on that thought, allowed it to ruminate through the evening, for the other line of thought was too much for him to bear – that Alice would get in the car with her father the following morning to go to church. Yet, once he allowed himself to even consider that, and the inevitable outcome of it, he could not stop the thought from imposing itself over and over.