‘What?’ She looked puzzled.

‘This man. You were with him in his car before the crash, yes? So what if they find traces of you? Who knows, they might be looking for you even now.’

After she left, I went over everything she’d told me. Despite her distress, I thought she would feel better in a while, knowing he was dead. She’d rather be bereaved than dumped, to believe he would have come for her, they would have lived together. Perhaps now she would come to the point of leaving Nick. It was crazy, the prisons that people made in their minds. Suzi was an educated middle-class woman, with a living, affluent mother, who perhaps was not the most supportive, but would hardly turn her daughter out on to the street. The law was there to protect her, make sure she wouldn’t get kicked out of the marriage with nothing.

So what was she so scared of? The loss of social standing, the failure of a divorce, perhaps the loneliness, raising her child alone? I wished I could tell her how insignificant these things were, compared to what other pain life had up its sleeve. If she left Nick, I guaranteed she would barely give him a backwards glance. I had weighed up the different possibilities. On the one hand, if she left him, she might go far away from me, where I couldn’t follow. That was not an option. On the other, it would only serve my purposes if Nick was out of the picture. If she had the child, it was likely she would keep the house too (not that she’d want it, I imagined). So maybe it was down to me to give her a helping hand.

Since I moved out here and everything changed, I had found myself thinking more and more about Nick. Nicholas Thomas. I had been worried for some time now that he would upset my plans, so tight was the control he had over Suzi. I’d friended him on Facebook after our dinner, in the account I’d set up under Nora Halscombe. I doubted they would think to google me, and if they did, they’d find nothing under that name. I had friended a few other random people to make it seem like I had an established profile, and he’d accepted the request after a few hours, doubtless not even thinking about it, and so I had access to his whole life, and could run my fingers over it looking for the cracks.