Connie hadn’t even been aware that the man in her arms had stopped crying. He was staring at her over his shoulder.

‘You should go. The police will fetch the photos for me. You’re going to be exhausted for a couple of days. Sleep is essential. Lots of it,’ she told him.

Cal nodded. She released him and he stood up, offering a hand to pull her off the floor, too.

‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘I won’t ever come in here again.’

‘I get it,’ she said. ‘People who haven’t lost a loved one think you only say goodbye once at the funeral. But you don’t, you say goodbye in a thousand places. A favourite coffee shop, a road junction, while you’re eating a curry, wearing a special jacket. The goodbyes keep on coming. It’ll seem endless. You should know that it isn’t, but the process is long and sometimes it’s a roundabout not a straight road. Your children will get you through.’

He gave a sharp nod. ‘I’ll leave the keys in the door, if you could have the police return them to me.’

‘Sure,’ she told his already departing back.

Waiting until she heard his footsteps in the kitchen below, Connie went to stand where the murderer had. She put her back against the wall.

‘Why this room?’ she asked the empty space. ‘If you weren’t planning on raping her, it would have been easier to have taken her from the kitchen, avoiding the stairs. Maybe when she was putting the washing in. Anywhere downstairs.’

But she’d answered her own question, and she’d known it while she was still holding Angela’s widowed husband. This was the version of Angela that he’d wanted to steal. In that moment, and in the place where she was all wife and mother. This was how he’d wanted her. He’d watched her preparations, seen her most private rituals and routines. The practicality of lifting an unconscious body down the stairs hadn’t even been a factor.

Connie didn’t wait for a police officer to retrieve the photos from the loft. There were plastic boxes in a row, carefully labelled. Angela’s handwriting, she guessed by its curvy slant and small precision. The middle drawer gave her what she wanted. Pulling out three bulky albums, she climbed back down the ladder and sat with her back against the hallway wall.

There was nothing unusual about what was contained in the albums. Photos from when Angela and Cal had met then married. Holiday photos, their parents and siblings, Christmases and birthdays. Then the children had come along, and page after page of snaps had been lovingly printed out in spite of the digital tendency simply to drop photos into desktop folders.