Oh, hell! It seemed to have gotten buried under everything else. She rummaged around in her bag, silently praying it wouldn’t go to voicemail before she could get to it. Finally, her stiff and uncooperative fingers grasped it. She pulled it up to her ear. ‘Brody?’ she said breathlessly.

‘Anna.’ He sounded… different. Not good. ‘We need to talk.’

‘I know,’ she said, just as the lift pinged and the doors opened in front of her. She’d known they needed to talk for one week and six days now; she was just very glad that Gabi had been right and he’d come around to realizing that on his own.

She squeezed into the lift, which was already filled with people with bulky shopping bags. ‘Brody… Are you okay?’

The lift doors slid closed. Brody said something, but it sounded a bit like he was speaking underwater, and the signal kept cutting out. Damn lift!

‘I can’t hear you,’ she tried to say clearly but without actually shouting, because it suddenly seemed as if all ears in the confined space were trained on her conversation.

His reply was just garbled rubbish.

‘Don’t… Just don’t go anywhere. Okay?’ she said more loudly, not caring now who was listening. Let them have their show. ‘I’ll call you back in a minute, I promise. Just please, please pick up when I do.’

She started dialling Brody’s number the moment the lift doors opened. Seconds later, she was striding across the car park, phone pressed to her ear as it continued to ring. What was taking him so long? He must have had the phone in his hand when he’d called her, and she’d hung up less than a minute ago.

It seemed to take an age, but finally she reached her car, unlocked it and slid into the driving seat. She slammed the door closed with her free hand, cutting off the noise of other vehicles and the whirring fans of the air-conditioning units of the shops below the car park. She was staring ahead at a concrete post when he finally answered.

‘I’m going to tell you about a day in my life from just over nine years ago,’ he began. ‘I know you’re going to have questions, Anna – you always do – but I’d really appreciate it if you just let me get through it before you ask anything.’

‘Okay,’ Anna replied quietly. She became aware of her pulse drumming rhythmically. This was serious. Really serious. Beyond the concrete pillar, the sky was dark and impenetrable.

Brody exhaled. ‘That day, I travelled with my ex-wife, Katri – she’s Finnish – to my parents’ house in the Lake District. They’d moved there about five years before. We were living in London at the time, in Richmond…’

Not a million miles from here, Anna thought. It was strange to think of Brody living less than twenty miles away at some point in the past, unreal almost.

‘It was a long drive, made worse by an accident on the M6, and it took us about seven hours to get there.’ He paused for a moment, as if readying himself. ‘Our two-year-old daughter, Lena, was in the car with us.’