Katie concentrated on looking calmly at this younger woman, although her heart was already sinking in anticipation of more bad news. She still felt like shit. That turn she’d had in the museum had upset her more than it should have, and every time she thought of the weird conversation she’d had with her visitor, she felt sick. Poor woman. Imagine coming for an afternoon’s innocent museum browse and ending up talking to a raving lunatic who said she was the curator. God knows what the woman must have thought of Katie. The problem Katie was still having, was the sick but strong feeling that she’d somehow betrayed her family today. Crazy. Plain crazy. She had nearly fainted up there on the balcony, and even when she was pregnant she never fainted. Did Sam have something catching? Sam. There was still the hard nugget of worry about Sam.

It had been a bad day all right, but she had thought it couldn’t get worse. Wrong. What was Billy’s teacher waiting back to tell her?

‘I’m Agnes Root, Mrs Hunt.’

‘Yeah. I know, Agnes. We met at the PTA.’

‘Of course. Sorry. I keep thinking no one remembers you at these things. You know, with all the head teachers hogging the speeches and stuff.’

‘What’s up with Billy?’

‘Right. Probably nothing. But I just wanted to tell you he’d been unusually withdrawn all day, and more importantly I wanted to show you this.’

She leaned over her desk, picked up a big sheet of paper and handed it to Katie.

‘We did science and painting today. I wanted them to paint rainbows and prisms. This is Billy’s.’

Katie took off her gloves and accepted the paper from Agnes Root. She held it in front of her in silence, and her mouth opened slightly.

There was a triangular shape in the centre of the picture, just like the one on the board behind Miss Root’s desk. The picture was familiar. Katie still had that ancient Pink Floyd album, Dark Side Of The Moon, that Tom gave her years ago, the one with the cover that had a beam of white going into a triangle and coming out as a rainbow. Hippy stuff, but Billy liked that cover. This was the same. Except that a rainbow was going into this triangle, and bursting out the other side was a snaking, scribbled nightmarish gash of black, that filled the rest of the page and had been so savagely applied to the paper it had torn it near the triangle. Katie swallowed. Beneath the horrible painting was Billy’s scrawled writing.

‘Dad.’

Agnes Root was watching Katie’s face. ‘I wondered if there was a problem at home.’

Katie could hardly speak. She croaked her words. ‘A problem?’

The teacher shifted in her seat. ‘Well, any … difficulties perhaps with Billy’s relationship with his father.’