‘Action Man playing up?’ He was joking, and she expected to see a jealous sneer on his face, but all she saw was what looked like genuine concern.

Romy sighed. She hadn’t moved from the doorway and had no intention of doing so.

‘I’m tired,’ she said. ‘Is there anything I can get you before I go to bed?’

Part of her wanted to blurt out, then and there, what Finch had told her, finally force him to tell her the truth. But she knew she was too wound up, too exhausted to be coherent. Plus Michael needed to be kept calm. She didn’t want him disappearing behind another panic attack just as she was getting to the crux of that evening with Grace. It would wait till tomorrow.

As she slipped into bed, Romy felt as if she’d been put through a mangle and spat out the other side. She still remembered her mother’s mangle and could instantly recall washday and the delicious soapy smell of the laundry powder bubbling away in the steamy water of the twin tub, the clothes churning beneath the surface. Then her mother picking them out with wooden tongs and squeezing them briefly – the spinner bit of the ‘twin’ didn’t work, like much else in the house – and feeding them through the two wooden rollers of the mangle.

Romy, as a small child, was allowed to turn the handle and watch the flattened clothes slide out the other side and plop stiffly into the waiting clothes basket before her mother hung them on the line outside. She felt like those clothes now: squashed flat, lifeless, devoid of her normal shape.

She could understand Finch’s position all too well. If she were him, she would surely have reacted in the same way. But instead of sympathizing with Grace and being as appalled as he – which any decent person would have done – she’d gone on the defensive and virtually blamed the girl for Michael’s behaviour.

That night, sixteen years ago, sat like a stone in Romy’s stomach, as if she had been there too, as if she herself were also to blame: Michael’s sleazy partner in crime. She knew it was ridiculous, but she felt like those mothers of serial killers who stand by their sons and say in all honesty, ‘My Frankie’s a good boy. He’d never do such a terrible thing.’ She had seen it in Finch’s eyes, his shock and bewilderment when she continued to side with Michael.

What did he do that night? she asked herself, as she lay there on the edge of sleep, eyelids drooping from tiredness in the stuffy bedroom.