‘Yeah. Why?’

‘You seem… Are you on drugs?’

He laughs. ‘No. It’s just been an odd day.’

And he tells her about Liv, and the labour ward, and the baby being born, while her mouth drops open in surprise.

‘So, it’s not yours?’ she manages at last.

‘Definitely not.’

‘Are you…’ She’s not sure how he might feel about the news. ‘Relieved?’ she tries.

‘I don’t know what I am. It’s one less thing to worry about, that’s for sure. But the idea of it all wasn’t so bad in the end.’ He turns to her. ‘And how’s your case coming on?’

She talks about Connor and the confession, his face creasing in sympathy as she tells the story.

‘It’s just so depressing,’ she finishes. ‘All so fucking unnecessary. That the guy would be homeless in the middle of the storm. That three nasty teenagers would think it fun to force him into a freezer. That he would die as a result.’

‘You can’t change any of that, Freya,’ Robin says. ‘You can only do your job.’

‘But it’s all so senseless. Same with Jon.’ Freya stops. She hadn’t meant to get onto this subject, but sitting here, with Robin, it feels good to let it out. ‘Why did he have to die?’

Robin looks across at the massive cathedral, the shrine to a supposedly benevolent god that created a world where these injustices happened. ‘I don’t believe in any of this stuff,’ he says. ‘In God, or his plan, or that we have a destiny we can’t control.’ He picks a daisy from the grass and rolls it around in his fingers. ‘I asked the same question when Georgia and the twins died.’ He looks sideways at her for a moment. ‘And I couldn’t find any answers. Not straightforward ones, anyway. We just have to carry on, living our lives in a way that would make the people that loved us proud.’

Freya remembers her own words to Connor, merely hours before. He hadn’t made his grandfather proud, had he? Not in the end. But he’d owned up to what he’d done, and maybe that was a start.

‘Robin,’ she begins. ‘About what happened with Amy.’ He looks across at her, the usual frown back on his face. ‘Is it over?’

‘I think so, Frey. Yes.’

‘Okay.’ Next to them a pigeon looks for crumbs; a peal of laughter from a toddler echoes round the cathedral grounds. ‘What are you going to do about Finn?’ she asks at last.

He sighs. He lies back again in the grass, his hands behind his head. He stares up at the sky. ‘I really don’t know,’ he replies. Then he closes his eyes.