He had some willpower, not touching that phone on Saturday night. It hits me all over again how much of a fight me and Steve are in for. ‘She was OK with that?’ I ask.

Lucy lifts a shoulder. ‘She didn’t care. It was only for a few months, right? And Joe being obsessed was what she wanted; she wasn’t complaining. But I didn’t like it. A control freak like that . . .’

She lets it fall. I don’t pick it up. She’s right, obviously: this should have been yet another alarm bell waking Aislinn the hell up. This guy who couldn’t let a text or a Post-it go out of his control, how did she think he was gonna take it when she kicked him to the kerb? Her own floodwaters had risen so deep around her, they drowned it out. She underestimated herself too.

‘By the beginning of December,’ Lucy says, ‘Aislinn said she was nearly there with Joe. He told her he loved her all the time, he was constantly going on about the great stuff he’d do for her when they could be together; he was this close to offering to leave his wife. And Ash – Jesus. She was on a total high, all the time: talking a mile a minute and screaming laughing at nothing and never able to sit still, she was like someone on speed. Not from having a guy wrapped round her finger – Ash wasn’t like that; because her plan was working. She could hardly believe it. To her, it was like finding out that magic was real and she had it, she could turn pumpkins into carriages, she could turn princes into frogs and back again. Do you . . . Does that make any sense? Do you get it?’

‘Yeah,’ I say. ‘I totally get it.’ Out of nowhere I think of my first morning on Murder. Me in my new suit cut for victory, satchel swinging and shining, my heels on the footpath laying down a fast rhythm on the city swirl of buses and voices as I sliced straight through them heading for the Murder squad room waiting for me, finally, finally all my own. I could have done the walk to the door in ten-foot leaps. That morning I could have pointed at the Castle and made its roofs unfurl in great gold petals and trumpet blasts.

Lucy says, jamming out her cigarette, ‘And then Rory came along.’

I say, ‘Rory wasn’t in the plan, no?’

‘The Plan . . .’ She spreads her hands with a flourish. ‘I’d started thinking of it like that, in capital letters: THE PLAN, da-da-da-dum. No: Rory definitely wasn’t in the plan. Rory was my fault. I dragged Aislinn out to that book launch – and it took some dragging – because I was hoping if she had a night off from sitting at home obsessing over whether Joe would call round, if she went out and had a laugh and a chat about normal stuff with people our age, then she might get some perspective. Realise how mental this whole thing was.’