Connie nodded. He wasn’t talking about retrieving the photos.

‘Do you want me to go first?’

‘Please,’ he said.

They walked from the kitchen to the bottom of the staircase. Cal gripped the bannisters. Connie let him take each step in his own time. The weight he was dragging kept threatening to pull him to the bottom again, but he forced his feet upwards. It took three minutes to cover the fourteen steps. Cal was panting by the time he reached the top.

‘Your choice, postpone this or get that door open and face it.’

He shuddered.

‘Do it,’ he said.

Connie slid her hand around the doorknob. It turned easily and that felt wrong. For some reason she’d expected the door to be harder to open. Cal stepped into the room with his eyes closed.

‘I don’t want to see it,’ he said, then opened his eyes anyway.

Connie took his hand as he surveyed the damage to his life. It was a negative, a stripping away of what had been. The mattress and bedding had been taken for testing, as had the curtains. The carpets, blood-spattered, had been removed too. No items of clothing were in sight. Those that had been left out when Angela had died, also taken to the forensics lab. The book Angela had been in the middle of reading at her death, gone. She would never find out how it ended.

Cal gave a wavering smile. ‘It’s like when we moved in. Before the children. No curtains, just a couple of bits of furniture. We saved up for everything over time. We …’ His first attempt at the sentence was drowned with tears. ‘We wanted a boy and a girl, and that’s what we got. This house, the kids, a park just down the road. It all worked out, and I don’t know …’ He fell to his knees. ‘I don’t know how she could be taken and not me. I can’t understand what we did to deserve this. I want her back.’ He looked up at Connie, his hands outstretched. ‘Please, you have to bring her back.’

Sitting on the floor behind him, Connie put her arms around Cal, her chest against his back as he rocked backwards and forwards, raging and keening. She leaned her head against his shoulder and kept him pinned to her, grounded in the world between his dead wife and the living children who needed their dad.

Connie looked at the window space that had held floor-length curtains. Angela’s murderer had hidden there, statue-still, and watched her. She’d bathed just before getting into bed that night, and he’d waited for the duration. Before that she’d cleaned the kitchen and put overnight washing in. It had churned away unaware in the utility room below as she’d fought for her final breaths.

‘What is it?’ Cal asked.