Her DNA would also be all over the scratch on his face, and the vomit in the bushes.

Ralph was dead.

If I tell them I was here, they might think I killed him.

She tried to stop thinking about herself and how this could affect her, but failed. It would all come out after the autopsy, that he’d recently been having sex. With her.

But how bad would it look, if she said nothing? If he’d had a heart attack and she didn’t even call an ambulance? She could be up for manslaughter or something! At the very least, she’d lose her job, and if she lost her job, she’d lose the cottage. Of course she could afford to buy a new place, but this one was her home; her sanctuary.

Paula would never speak to her again, and rightly so.

Yet surely there was no point in calling an ambulance now. Meredith had seen a couple of dead bodies before – twice over the years, pensioners visiting the house had collapsed and died. She was head first aider, so both times she’d been called to try and revive them while the ambulance came. Both of them, a man and a woman, had looked less dead than Ralph did currently.

Meredith sat back on her heels, almost hyperventilating. Are you insane? she asked herself. Of course she should call 999, even if he was dead. She knew the drill. With shaking hands she picked up her phone, forefinger trembling over the nines.

Then she straightened up and walked away from the ice house, back towards the rose garden. He was dead. She couldn’t be near him for a second longer.

As she walked, she dialled – but it wasn’t three nines she pressed.

Pete answered instantly.

‘Hey Sis.’

The comforting sound of his voice dissolved her, and for a moment she couldn’t speak.

‘Are you there? What’s wrong? Has something happened?’

‘Pete … help me. I don’t know what to do.’ Her voice wasn’t her own, a shrill of panic.

YOU DO KNOW. CALL A FUCKING AMBULANCE, NOW, her conscience yelled.

‘OK, calm down. Breathe.’

Him telling her to breathe made her think about Ralph’s failure to do so, and she thought she was going to pass out. She sank down on an iron bench in the rose garden, dizziness making the pastel petals blur into confetti.

Focus. Pete would help her.

‘Are you hurt?’

She shook her head as if he could see her. ‘No. I’m in the rose garden. I did something stupid.’

He paused and she knew, with the twin telepathy that occasionally flared between them, that he was momentarily thinking of saying something flippant, something like ‘Did you burn the house down?’

‘I got drunk in Ralph’s office earlier. He was hammered too and he came on to me. We ended up having a quick shag in the bogs…’