In fact, there had been more than a few things, on and off, in the year since Iain’s call, but they were so small, Meredith hadn’t bothered to mention them. If she did, she’d need to admit why they worried her. And anyway, it was all just tiny stuff: far easier to dismiss as nothing – as her own paranoia: the unopened can of green paint left in her front garden – a visitor could have dumped it there. The bathtub full of cold water she came home from work to find one day – she must have run it herself that morning and forgotten. Things moved around in her living room – must have been her. The fact that she woke up every night screaming and covered in sweat was nothing to do with it, she insisted to herself.

Nothing to worry about. Nobody else apart from Pete had keys to her house. Everything else, apart from her anxiety levels, had remained the same, at least for the next few months. She had kept her head down, carried on working in the shop.

The eighties revival tour happened, without Cohen. Nobody came for her. To her knowledge there had been nothing in the papers, and no reporters had come to the shop.

‘I live on the estate, in a cottage just past the greenhouses. It’s about five minutes’ walk from here. Last week, when I arrived home I saw that … it’s probably nothing … but someone had cut the heads off all my dahlias. I’ve got my own little fenced-off garden in front of the house, but anybody could walk in – to the garden, obviously, not the house. Visitors pass it all the time when they’re walking round the grounds. I just thought it was weird. They were definitely beheaded intentionally; clean cuts, with scissors or secateurs, and the heads were just left lying in the flowerbed, about twenty of them. Every single flower had been cut.’

She felt sick, as if it was only real now that she had admitted it.

‘I see. That is a bit weird,’ agreed the PC, scribbling furiously.

George bristled. ‘Why didn’t you tell me? You should have reported it!’

‘Because, like I said, I just assumed it was a visitor with anger issues, or one of the gardeners having a bad day. Or even a kid, messing around.’

‘That’s vandalism, that is!’

‘Well, in the grand scheme of things I didn’t think it was a major crime.’

Not a major crime, no … but another of those little things that were probably just coincidence. They had to be.