I’d begun to wonder how much Bella might have told him – certainly not all. “Just to find out how you are,” I said.

“Okay.” With a cough that suggested otherwise he said “I’m good.”

“Better than you were last time I saw you?”

Another cough left him sounding reluctant to say “Bout the same.”

“I trust your mother’s looking after you.”

“Bell is.” With additional resentment he said “I can look after myself.”

Though the reference to Bella left me nervous of being overheard, I had to ask “Where have you been today?”

“Here at home reading about your aunt. Looking at everything she did.”

Once I would have welcomed this more than I did now. “Did it help you much?”

“Just trying to get ready for our next trip so I’ll get more out of it.”

I was dismayed by how routinely he assumed I’d know that this didn’t include me. “How many of those are there going to be?”

“Not many now, Bell says. We’re nearly finished.”

I wished I could find this reassuring. “And what does she say will happen then?”

Perhaps the pause conveyed his disbelief that I should ask. “We’ll stay together,” he said.

I couldn’t risk enquiring whether she’d said so, a question likely to antagonise him further. Before I could think of a safer response he said “How are you doing, dad?”

“Just working on my latest task.”

“I mean have you sorted out your shit.”

“I believe I will have soon.”

As I hoped this might satisfy or at any rate silence him, I heard a doorbell ring beyond him. “She’s here now,” he said.

I could have thought our conversation had summoned her to put an end to it. “We’ll talk more soon,” I said.

This was far from the promise it resembled. It felt more like an omen of the unavoidable. Pocketing my phone, I grabbed my car keys from the desk. I’d learned what I needed to know – that Bella would be at Julia’s – and could only hope she wouldn’t sense my purpose.

The suburbs, the underwater tunnel where the rush hour had already begun, the city centre on the far side full of queues of traffic, the relative release the motorway eventually provided, adding my car to the race home – I was much less aware of any of this than of the glances I kept having to give the mirror. There was never any sign of an intruder, but had there been until just before she’d sent my parents to their deaths? Perhaps my thoughts weren’t quite enough to bring her, unless she couldn’t find an excuse to absent herself from where she was. Only my own nervousness had undermined my driving by the time I reached Julia’s house.