I shut the door on the police with relief, and went to pick up Isobel. She was red-faced, howling in her crib. I watched her every day for signs of who she looked like, but so far all I could see was Suzi, her fuzz of hair, her clear blue eyes.

‘Shh, shh.’ I jiggled her in my arms, and gradually she went limp and contented against me. ‘You’re hungry, aren’t you? Don’t worry, angel, Mummy will feed you soon.’

Suzi had looked stunned on that winter night two months back, when I’d herded her and Dr Holt into the warmth and light of her cottage. The cellar door stood open, a dark yawning mouth, and I could see that I’d been right about where Nick was keeping Suzi. It haunted me still, the little bed, the card table, the warm prison he’d made for her. Both of them were semi-hysterical, and Dr Holt kept saying we had to call the police. But I talked him round. All we had to do was move the body, drag it a bit further into the deep ditch at the side of the road, then leave it there until the snow thawed. That could have been a week or, as it turned out, several months.

In that time, I would text Suzi from Nick’s phone, which he had conveniently left in the house, suggesting he had ditched her after learning of her infidelity. He hadn’t disconnected it from every app since I took his other one, so it was easy to get in and reset the passcode, as I had done with Patrick’s. The police might be able to tie these three suspicious deaths together – Conway, Nick, and Patrick of course – but there was enough material there to write themselves a different story. Conway had been blackmailing Nick, perhaps, or Nick had killed him to shut him up about Suzi. Or Patrick and Conway had been killed by the same person, someone else who was being squeezed for money.

Suzi didn’t believe it would work. Nick’s mother would notice he hadn’t called. His office would wonder why he didn’t come back after Christmas. But I knew it would. In the modern world, people don’t need to hear your voice to believe it’s you they’re speaking to. A few evasions here and there, and he’d resigned by email and told his mother over text (because he’d been sick, as he’d already helpfully told her himself, he’d lost his voice) that he was leaving Suzi, going away for a while to get his head straight.