Blackmail. He didn’t say the word, but that’s what it was. And so Patrick had been able to lean on people to do what he wanted, and let him escape with his life. The debts that were mounting, the woman who said she was having his child. And me, pressuring him to do IVF, to give me a baby.

Part of me still thought it was insane. And yet. My internet research, carried out long into the night, until my eyeballs frazzled, had shown me there were indeed ways to fake your own death. That Canoe Man had got a fake passport, using the birth certificate of a child who’d been born around the same time as him but died young. Apparently that was quite possible to do. I thought about the sums of money disappearing from our accounts, always just under the threshold of suspicion. He must have been planning this for a while.

The plot sounded so elaborate. Like something you’d read in one of those trashy thrillers I devoured on the long nights when he didn’t come home. The reason for running when he did was that luck had kicked in. A man was admitted to the neurology ward in the hospital he worked at. A man around Patrick’s age, in good health apart from the fact he’d been in a biking accident and hit his head on the tarmac. No one had come to claim him, and from the brands of his cycling wear, the police thought he was a tourist – American maybe. Someone with no family or close ties in the country, no one to look for him, no one who knew where he was. He was unconscious, badly hurt, but they still thought he might recover.

‘You see, we had to have a body,’ Conway had told me, swilling whisky. ‘They do autopsies for any suspicious death, and unless we had the whole morgue on side – well. But they’re busy, aren’t they? Funding’s so tight. They aren’t going to DNA test every single body they get when it’s clear who it is.’

So they had simply swapped the patients. Conway, who was in charge of the induced coma anyway, fiddled with the displays a touch, moved the man’s chart around.

‘You can do that in my role,’ he bragged. ‘A tiny flip of a switch and boom, someone’s dead. The margin of life, it’s so much smaller than we think.’