Conor had bought coffee and sandwiches from the Cherry Tree café, and the two were sitting in his car listening to the radio, monitoring the upheaval caused by Tom’s resignation. They couldn’t risk going home, they said. Not yet. Flan and Ginny would have more questions than they’d be able to answer.

‘Okay,’ said her mother, her voice faltering slightly, ‘nothing I say will be easy for you, but I want you to know that I never meant to kill Leo. The truth is I loved him. And what Hannah said is right: he loved me. Or, at least, I thought he did.’

‘I need to know how it started.’

‘Quite suddenly, actually. We got talking while I was in the church doing flowers for a wedding. I remember I was in front of the altar, fiddling about with some roses. He was sitting in the front row. We started chatting. Up until that point, I’d viewed him as “the priest”: the man who said Mass and heard confessions and visited old people. I think we talked about books or politics. Something non-religious, anyway. The connection was immediate. After that day, we kept on finding excuses to meet until … Well, you don’t need to hear all the details, do you?’

Nina’s eyes locked onto her mother. ‘You must have known the relationship couldn’t go anywhere.’

‘To begin with, I didn’t think that far ahead. I was unhappy at home. I’d come to realise that I’d married the wrong man. I’d met someone else, someone whom I believed was the right man. Thinking didn’t really come into it. I was in love. Simple as that.’

‘Except it wasn’t simple. And please don’t pin your own bad behaviour on Dad.’

‘I’m not. I’m just saying it wasn’t a very warm marriage. It wasn’t what I’d hoped for.’

Nina rested her face in her palms before speaking again. ‘Forgive me for pointing this out, but compared to many people around here, I would have thought your life was pretty good. Dad always looked after you. He looked after all of us. We had nice clothes and meals in restaurants and foreign holidays when most people in the village thought a bag of chips was a big treat. And I’m not just talking about people who didn’t have the money for anything else. There were plenty who spent their money in the pub or at the races rather than on their family. Dad was never mean.’

‘I didn’t say he was. But it’s possible to be generous with money and mean with everything else. You must know that. I would have swapped every bloody holiday for a few laughs, for some affection, that sense of being kindred spirits. I wanted to feel like I was with the right person.’