‘And long before that, too. She must have planned this ages ago, so that if she died I would suffer. It wasn’t me. So it must have been someone else. Who do you think it was, if your mother had nothing to do with it?’

‘What about Hayley … or Aiden?’ I stutter.

‘My bet is on your mother. She was always making trouble for me.’

Your words stab into me like daggers.

‘Setting someone up for murder is so serious,’ I protest, ‘much more so than trying to make out someone is playing away. She loved me so much, it’s hard to believe she would harm the person I love most in such an extreme way.’

‘Loving you so much, too much, is precisely why she would. Maybe as a man you can’t understand. She wanted to be the woman you loved best. The only woman.’

I look across at your delicate face, contorted with despair. I reach for your hand beneath the table and wrap my fingers around yours.

153

Saffron

He doesn’t reply. He wraps his fingers around mine, and frightened of losing him, I tremble inside.

154

Hayley

I’m sitting in the garden, laptop on my knee, drinking iced lemonade, ‘organising’ the household for the week. Meal plan first. Then Ocado delivery. I zap into the online calendar, just to check the boys’ activities for the week. To make sure they fit in with Miles and me. To check they meet with my approval. I’m enjoying this. Enjoying being in charge of the household. Admin done, I snap my laptop shut. Time for my swim.

I walk through the garden. The gardeners are busy. A young boy of about sixteen with a pudgy face and a pudgy hairstyle is mowing the lawn. A young woman in her twenties with a slim figure and tousled honey blonde hair is dead-heading the roses. Their boss, I think he is their father actually, is trimming the high hedge, with a machine that looks like a strimmer, but has a long, jagged saw on the end of it. I stand behind him, until he senses I’m there. He turns the saw off and stops. He pulls his ear protectors off, to talk to me, and smiles.

‘Is everything OK?’ he asks, addressing me as if I am the boss. The owner. I like that.

‘Thank you, that looks lovely, but you’ve missed some on the top to the left.’

‘I’m about to do it, but I have to get the higher stepladder for that.’

He is always ‘about to do’ whatever I ask. I have to keep an eye on him. Sometimes he’s a bit too hasty. A bit too Jack the Lad. I understand he has a bit of a local reputation as a womaniser. He’s someone young women have to be wary of. Caprice told me that.