Her sitting room is cold, the uncompromising damp cold after a night with the heat off. It smells of toast, smoke – the legal kind this time – and coffee. The stuffed fox and the old phones and the coil of cable are gone; instead there’s a record player and a stack of beat-up albums, a big cardboard box of flowery crockery, and a roll of canvas that touches the ceiling, coming unrolled to show a painted country lane disappearing into the distance. The room feels charged up with too many stories, jostling in the corners, pushing for space.

Lucy sits down first this time, grabbing the sofa with its back to the window and leaving me the one that takes the light – she learns fast. She’s got her armoury lined up ready on the coffee table: pack of smokes, lighter, ashtray, mug of coffee. She doesn’t offer me any. She sits still and watches me, braced for my first move.

I take the shitty sofa. ‘I’m going to tell you some stuff I’ve been thinking,’ I say. ‘I don’t want you to tell me whether I’m right or wrong till I’m done talking. I don’t want you to say anything at all. I just want you to listen. OK?’

‘I’ve told you everything I’ve got to tell.’

‘Just listen. OK?’

She shrugs. ‘If you want.’ She makes a thing of settling herself back into her sofa, cross-legged, mug nested in her lap, ready to humour me.

I can play that game too. I rearrange cushions, shift my arse on my bockety sofa, find the best angle to stretch out my legs. Lucy winds tighter, wanting me to get on with it.

‘So,’ I say, when I’m good and comfortable. ‘Let’s start with your friendship with Aislinn. You two were a lot closer than you tried to make out. Her phone records say you guys talked or texted basically every day. You were proper friends; best friends.’

Lucy pokes her coffee with her fingertip, scoops out a speck of something and examines it. The solid black of her against the blue-and-rust-striped Mexican blankets, and the white-blond forelock falling in her white face, make her hard to see, like a blank spot in the middle of my vision.

‘So there has to be a reason you didn’t want us knowing that, on Sunday. And the point when you started claiming you and Aislinn weren’t close was when you told us about her secret fella. Which has to mean three things. A, you know more about him than you let on. B, you’re scared of him; you don’t want him finding out you know anything. And C, you think he might find out through us.’

One blink, on the word scared. She rubs her fingertip clean on the edge of the cup.