She wanted to forget that Merry Heather had ever existed.

‘Don’t you have any wine?’ Paula asked, appearing next to her and making her jump. ‘I’ve had so much tea my tonsils are floating. Everyone keeps offering me fucking tea, like it’s going to make everything all better. I don’t want tea. I want alcohol.’

‘OK. If you’re sure.’

Meredith had a sudden flashback to Ralph’s purpled tongue and lips, and unscrewed a bottle of white from the fridge instead of the already-opened Merlot on the galley counter.

‘Did you drive here?’

Paula’s lip trembled like a little girl’s. ‘No. Can’t drive. The police impounded the car for evidence. God knows why. So I walked. I needed some air.’

Meredith poured her a glass, having a Pavlovian reaction to the greedy glugging sound. Sod the tea. She took down a second glass and filled that too. ‘Let’s go and sit on the roof.’

They took their wine, and the bottle, and climbed up on the roof of the barge, where Pete kept two folding garden chairs. It was a beautiful day, not as hot as the previous week, thanks to the bright white clouds scudding intermittently across the sun and diluting its bite for a few minutes, before it pushed them aside again to make the river sparkle. The towpath opposite was busy with families out cycling or walking.

Meredith picked the open Chandler paperback off one of the chairs and gestured for Paula to sit down.

‘Look at them,’ Paula said in a choked voice, watching a little girl scooting along the towpath opposite, two thin pigtails flying straight out behind her, a fluffy sort of dog cavorting next to her, barking its head off, and the girl’s parents walking behind, hand in hand, in matching sunglasses, laughing. The dog’s barks carrying across the river made a metallic scraping sort of sound. ‘Not a fucking care in the world.’

‘You don’t know that,’ Meredith said, as sympathetically as she could. ‘They’re probably going through all sorts of shit too.’

‘Her husband hasn’t just turned up dead in a pond,’ Paula said, and began to cry.

Meredith didn’t know what to do. She felt suddenly overcome by a huge wave of exhaustion. Probably guilt-induced, because she didn’t want to have to cope with Paula and her emotions. She knew she owed it to her, sure, but at that moment she felt an overwhelming urge to unburden herself. She could almost visualise the look on Paula’s face as she, Meredith, told her that she and Ralph had shagged in the bog at work just minutes before his death, and that someone must have taken his body and dumped it in the pond. Surely anything would be better than this torturous limbo.