‘Make spoons,’ she instructed.

The three of us curled up on top of the bed. My mum on her side, Marlon in the middle and me where my father should have been. They were both exhausted and I listened to the sound of their breathing as they slipped easily into sleep, and I must have dozed off too because somewhere between sleeping and waking I sat up realising that there was someone at the front door. The bell was ringing, a chiming melodic run that was as twee as a ‘welcome’ mat, old-fashioned and strange as it echoed in the big house, like a call to church on Sunday morning or a dream of childhood.

Christian was on our doorstep.

‘I’m so sorry, Tara,’ he said.

And I fell into his arms and let him hold me as if he would never let me go because I knew from the moment I looked at his face that death had come to our door.

40

Christian

DCI Stoner was right.

I had not been completely honest with my wife.

And I felt bad about that. No, lights years beyond bad.

I was deeply ashamed of the secrets I had kept from Tara.

I was ashamed that I had somehow become something less than the man I wanted to be.

But there were lies that I had told, and there were rooms that I had been in that Tara did not know about.

Yet as I stood at the ground-floor window of our house, watching the empty street, wearing the black tie of mourning that I had not worn since my mother’s funeral, I felt the first faint spark of hope.

For the first time in a long time, it felt like Tara and I were going to be all right. And maybe that’s the way it works – if you love someone, if you really love them – then you can get through anything.

What gave me hope was that DCI Stoner’s car was gone from our road.

According to what I had read online, it had not been the first time that he had watched his ex-wife and her family in the park.

Some reports suggested that it wasn’t even the first time that week.

And then there was his bombardment of text messages, his aggressively familiar comments left on social media, his drunken phone calls in the middle of the night – the great sour avalanche of disappointed love.

All in direct violation of the restraining order against DCI Stoner having contact with his ex-wife.

She told one newspaper that, in the face of his never-ending harassment, only her two small daughters had stopped her from contemplating suicide.

Our old lawyer, Kevin Steel, had called to say that if DCI Stoner was convicted of breaking his restraining order, then he faced a maximum penalty of six months’ imprisonment if he was tried in the Magistrate’s Court, and five years if he was tried before a jury in a Crown Court.