And so we’d settled down to wait. Unwilling to go back into her own house, that beautiful prison she’d thought she might never escape, Suzi had moved in with me, and then, when little Isobel arrived earlier than expected in January (hardly surprising with everything that had happened), to the hospital. It wasn’t suspicious if you thought Nick had left Suzi. At least, we hoped so. Now would be the real test. The police had found his body.

I was debating whether or not to text Suzi to tell her, when I heard the sound of a car pulling up. I watched as she took her customary five minutes to extract herself from the car, tangled in headphones, scarves, cardigans, shopping bags. She couldn’t seem to stop buying things for Isobel, as if making up for not feeling excitement before the birth.

As soon as she came in I said, ‘It’s time. They found him.’

Suzi’s face, flushed from the heat of the car, went pale. ‘Oh.’

‘It’s a good thing. Get it over with.’

‘What should we do?’

‘You need to call them – say you were at your mother’s, or a friend’s. Stick to the story. Nick left you. He’s been texting, you haven’t seen him.’

She took Isobel from me, soothing her in a gesture that made my heart ache. Issy wasn’t mine, she never would be. She wasn’t Patrick’s either, and as it turned out, there could have been no child for me with him. But I hoped she would think of me as at least a kindly aunt, and I hadn’t come away with nothing – I was going to take Poppet, since Suzi hadn’t the first clue about dogs, and hopefully train him up to be well behaved. We could never explain the true relationship between us, Suzi and I. All the same I hoped there was one, and one that would endure, no matter what happened next. She said, ‘But they’ll be able to tell, won’t they? How long he’s been . . . there. In the snow.’

‘I don’t know. Even if they do, you don’t know anything about it. If someone else texted you from his phone – well, how were you to realise that?’

I knew nothing as the innocent neighbour, and they’d never think to involve Dr Holt. There was no trail linking him to us, no reason they would think to test his jeep for damage, or discover that it had been sold just before Christmas. I had thought it through many times over the past two months, placing weight on each part of the story in turn. I was confident it would hold. After all, I’d done it before.