I had told her already, what I knew, and watched it seep through her like water into rock. Her face didn’t move as I repeated it. ‘He said . . . he’d seen you outside on the lawn and thought you . . . he thought you’d been flirting with him. It was rambling. But he more or less – he did it, Kar.’

Her jaw set. ‘Him.’

Timidly, I said: ‘Do you . . . is that something you think might have happened?’ I meant, was it Callum who had sex with you on the lawn, not Mike? Had sex with. That was not the right phrase, but I still didn’t know how to say it. ‘Did he – attack you?’

Karen thought about it. ‘I wasn’t lying. The aftershave, the jumper. They were Mike’s.’

‘The jumper was in the rubbish pile.’ I explained that Benji found it, shoved right to the bottom.

‘So someone wanted to destroy it? Wanted it burned?’

‘I guess so. Mike had taken it off, before dinner. It was so hot during the day, remember. It was lying on the decking. I was cross because he never put things away.’ Using the past tense to speak of him, my husband. Because I was afraid he would die, or because I knew things would never be the same again?

Karen’s mouth was pursed. She was hunched over, and the hands that held an empty paper cup were shaking. ‘He put it on. So I’d think it was Mike.’

‘Maybe he was just cold or . . .’ I stopped. I didn’t know why I was defending Callum. Why I was still, after all this time, trying to ease the brutal facts of what had happened. Trying to spare myself, when it was Karen who’d had this done to her, to her body and her mind.

‘He knew. About me and Mike. Mike said he thought Callum suspected.’

Me and Mike. It was a knife in me, but I was so numb I couldn’t feel it now. Later, sometime, all these wounds would make themselves felt, I was sure of it. ‘He did, yeah.’ Would Callum ever have told me? Did all our friends know, everyone except me?

‘He knew I’d think he was Mike, and I’d want to . . . that I’d not put my guard up. I was drunk. I was really really drunk. You don’t know what that feels like, when it’s being done to you, and you can’t get away, you can’t even move . . . he was kneeling on me, Al. On my . . . my legs. My back. I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t see him. It was so dark. All I could see was the jumper, and there was the smell too. The aftershave.’