‘But you’re not sure? Were you aware that James Caine was intimate with your wife, Mr Carver?’

I feel something rise in me.

It was kin to the feeling I had when my parents died. It was the grief of bereavement. Something had been taken away from me before I was ready to let it go. The words were hard to say.

‘No,’ I said, denying it all. ‘That’s not us. That’s not who we are.’

‘A straight yes or no will suffice, Mr Carver. Were you aware that James Caine was intimate with your wife?’

‘Tara,’ I said. ‘Her name is Tara.’

There was more that I could not find the words to say.

She is faithful, she is true, she is the love of my life. But it was all clogged up inside me. I leaned forward, as if I had been kicked in the solar plexus. A strange animal whimper escaped from my mouth. It was the crying you do when you are trying so hard to stop yourself from crying. I choked it down. I was not going to cry in front of these people.

‘I am pausing the interview,’ DI Ure said, watching me with something like shock as the grief bent me double.

I was too numb for tears. Too tired. Too proud.

The older cop in uniform came into the room.

Sergeant Cooper.

‘Hello, son,’ he said.

‘Mr Carver,’ DI Ure said to me while looking at him. ‘Would you like a break to think things through?’

Deep down, I already knew that the worst had happened. The sense of bereavement weighed heavy on me now. But the death – the actual death of what I loved – was already in the past.

Her phone, I thought. Our lovemaking. The tears that came too easily. The sudden impossibility of eye contact, eye contact. The radical change in the weather in her head.

The way that James Caine looked at the framed picture of Tara in the hallway of our house.

As if he knew everything about her. As if she would never have secrets from him. As if he owned her.

How could I not know?

‘Lose your rag, don’t you, son?’ Sergeant Cooper said, not unkindly.

I shook my head. ‘Not really.’

The old sergeant glanced at DI Ure. He wanted to impress her. He had that air of amused desperation that men get when they want to impress a woman, no matter the age difference.

‘Chucked a bottle at a bloke because he came down your street a bit sharpish,’ he said. ‘That’s not losing your rag?’

DI Ure shuffled the papers in front of her. The police were different when the tape was turned off. You felt like anything could happen.

‘Bit of a temper,’ Sergeant Cooper said, like an understanding doctor asking you where your malignant tumour hurts. ‘Would that be a reasonable assumption, son?’

There was another photograph that DI Ure had not shown me. She saw me looking at it upside down and she pushed it across the table to me, as if it might jog my wayward memory. In this one James Caine was no longer smiling for the camera. In this one he had the top of his head caved in.