She checks her watch. It’s almost two. She wanted to go back and see Heather. What if she wakes up and nobody’s there? She’s agitated by the thought.

The drug-addict woman approaches the duty officer behind the desk and starts arguing with him. Margot shrinks in her seat, wanting to make herself even smaller. Just when she thinks she can stand it no longer and will have to get some fresh air, Adam emerges, grim-faced.

She leaps to her feet. ‘All done?’

He nods.

‘Can we go?’

‘Yep. Let’s get out of here.’

As soon as Margot steps outside she gasps for air. Oh, how she hates being cooped up inside. It makes her feel like she can’t breathe. Heather’s always been the same. They share the love of the countryside, the open spaces, the lush greenery, the hills. Some mornings, before breakfast, they’d saddle their horses and ride across a stretch of land they called the Gallops. It was when Heather said she’d felt the most free – free of the constraints of being a wife and a mother. How would she cope in prison?

She wouldn’t. That’s the truth of it. For the first time Margot wonders if it would be better for her daughter if she never woke up.

‘So, what did they say? The police.’

Adam shrugs. ‘Not much. But it’s nothing to get excited about, Marg. I’ve used the gun in the past and so have you. Our fingerprints are bound to be on it.’

Her heart falls. Of course. That’s all this is. Nothing to get her hopes up about. It was Heather who killed those people. She was seen, for crying out loud. There are witnesses.

She feels despondent as she gets back into the car. Adam turns the radio on. It’s still tuned to Absolute 90s and Margot has to swallow the lump in her throat when Sinéad O’Connor’s ‘Nothing Compares 2 U’ comes on. An image pops into her head of her daughters belting out this song into hairbrushes in Flora’s bedroom. It had been a few months after Keith had died and she remembers being thankful that they’d seemed like their old selves. She’d been terrified their lives would be defined – ruined even – by the one idiotic moment that had cost Keith his life. But there they’d been, singing into their hairbrushes like any other normal ten- and twelve-year-old.

But they weren’t normal, were they? A thing like that was bound to have left its grubby mark on their once-clean souls.

‘Are you okay, Marg?’

Adam’s voice brings her out of the past and she realizes she has tears on her cheeks.