At five o’clock in the morning she snapped awake. The dawn light made the bedroom dreamlike, with no shadows, an umber rendering of a room that she was not part of, as if she were observing it from another place. She knew why she had woken like that. Like someone had pushed her. It was Monday; seven days exactly since Alex had died. The police had come to Paligny a week ago to tell them. They must have found Alex’s body at about the time she had woken. She lay wakefully, staring, and seeing only the white road, and the car wreck, and thinking it was as if a new life had started then, in a new landscape. She turned to look at Dan. She didn’t want to risk waking him by getting up, and have to speak, if only to say, Go back to sleep, so she lay still. She felt each second of each minute of the three hours until he woke, at eight o’clock. It was a meditation on loss, marking it. Seven days to the moment. There was no possibility of company in that feeling; it wasn’t her choice to be alone with it.

She pretended to be asleep when Dan got up. She didn’t think he believed her. When he had gone downstairs she sat up, and found Capitaine Vincent’s card in her bag, and called him. He did not answer, and she left a message.

‘Capitaine Vincent, it’s Beatrice Adamson. Please call me, if you need anything.’

She said something else, about wanting to help, but that wasn’t really why she’d called him. Her thoughts weren’t clear and she knew she sounded emotional. She wished she could delete the message. He wasn’t her friend, but he felt like an ally, and she couldn’t separate herself. She would have liked to see him.

Later that day, her brother Ed and his wife Elizabeth arrived from Tokyo. They were staying in a hotel, and came by Holford Road to say hello. Elizabeth was a cool, correct person, whose expression became intent whenever she looked at her husband. Efficiently affectionate in public, their private lives were unguessable. They had left their children in Tokyo, but showed pictures on their phones. Ed’s feelings were put aside in his mother’s presence, as they had always been. He shadowed her politely. He looked very like his father; as tall, but not so broad, and wore a handmade suit. He and Bea hugged. They had never known one another well.

‘We still can’t believe it’s happened,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Are the papers still snooping around?’

‘Not that I know of,’ said Griff. ‘Arun told them to fuck off, but I don’t know if it made any difference. They might not know we’re here.’