‘They questioned me yesterday. I said I couldn’t remember anything. They said they’d be back this morning.’

She caught him looking at her critically and touched her shaved head. The stubble pricked her fingertips. She winced, realizing how awful she must look. The wound was covered by a dressing, but at least the cartoonish bandage had been removed.

Douglas led her into the kitchen, where there were signs that he’d been tidying up. She looked around the makeshift room. After the stark whiteness of the hospital it seemed chaotic, over-colourful. The house smelled different too: musty and deserted, like someone had moved out in a hurry. The post was on the table, most of it junk. She barely glanced at it, her eyes following Douglas greedily as he made a cafetière of coffee and warmed milk in the microwave.

‘OK. Let’s talk.’ He glanced outside, where the dawn had touched the windows of the house behind with a pink glow. ‘I need to be out of here in an hour if I’m not going to be seen.’

‘Red sky in the morning,’ she said inconsequentially. ‘It’s going to rain.’

He poured steaming coffee into her mug and set it down on the kitchen table. The fragrance lifted her spirits.

‘It’s very tidy in here,’ she commented.

Douglas ignored her. ‘Tell me what went wrong.’

It was because of Douglas that she had phoned Angus and arranged to meet him on the Common that night. Douglas had said that they were going to have to start new lives somewhere else, and to do that properly they needed more money than either of them had. She wished now that she’d never told him, but at the time she had been trying to make him jealous, bragging about her wealthy ex-lover, hinting that he hadn’t always behaved himself, that he was at heart a crook.

It had been Douglas’s idea to wheedle money out of him and she had gone along with it because she could see no other way out of this horrible situation. Living round here, in the house where Nick had died, was killing her. She heard the crack of his skull a hundred times a day, saw his body fall to one side, heard the sick thud as he rolled off Douglas. The image would play through her consciousness while she was painting, making her hand pause mid-brushstroke. His knock on the door still rang out, his shout of anger hadn’t lost its power to make her cringe in horror. She’ll never get over it, just like she’ll never get over Izzy, because, no matter what Tim or Nick did that day, her own actions, her own selfishness, jealousy and desperation to be loved were at the root of it.