‘I don’t remember hardly anything about it apart from America and slavery,’ Charlie told Simon. They were on their way into work. For the first time since they’d moved in together, he’d handed his car keys to her as they left the house, without a word of explanation. To ward off any questions Charlie might have asked, Simon had got in first with one of his own – about Beloved, the book that had been sent anonymously to Sondra Halliday.

‘It was powerful and unsettling, but not much fun,’ Charlie went on, not sure he was listening. What was bothering him so much that he couldn’t drive? It couldn’t still be the old lady from Poole, could it? Muriel Pearson, who’d mistaken a picture of a woman on the side of an Asda van for a flesh-and-blood person? Did Simon suspect her of being Billy Dead Mates? Or her son, the one who’d rung DC James Wing to explain that his mother had made an embarrassing mistake? It wouldn’t be the stupidest plan Charlie had ever heard: make a complete tit of yourself in front of the police and they’re less likely to see you in the role of killer; you move seamlessly from the suspect category to Official Joke of the Investigation.

Charlie knew better than to ask Simon if he was thinking along the same lines. He always took longer to tell her when she seemed desperate to know.

She steered the car to the left to miss a dark lump on the road: brown with patches of red. She looked away quickly to avoid seeing spikes if there were any there to see, and told herself it probably wasn’t a hedgehog. The thought of hedgehogs or elephants being killed bothered her in a way that animal deaths in general didn’t.

Simon didn’t know this about her. She wanted to tell him, but now wasn’t the time. If he wasn’t paying attention to her description of Beloved, which he’d asked about, then the topic of disproportionate sympathy for hedgehogs was unlikely to engage him.