‘It’s called earning a living. You should try it sometime. It’s much harder than I make it look.’

He recoiled as if he had been slapped in the face.

And I was suddenly disappointed in both of us. For the cruel truth was that my husband was in decline. Not physically – he looked far better than he ever did when he was that pale, skinny twenty-something going on the road with bands getting up to God knows what in cheap hotels around the world. But Christian’s horizons had shrunk. He was a great dad, a loving husband – even if the sex had been somewhat sidelined, something else to be squeezed into a busy schedule. But Christian, I suddenly saw, was a man who needed to work, a man who was made better by work, for his own sense of self-worth, if nothing else. And I suspected all men were like that, and all women too, of course.

I knew Christian could never physically hurt me, but I also knew that there was a violence in him, and I could feel it coming. He got up from the floor, stepping all over his beloved vinyl as he picked the nearest thing – the ice bucket, filled to the brim with cubes, for he had the healing, Prosecco-fuelled rumpy-pumpy all meticulously planned – and hurled it with full force at the wall.

‘Oh, smash the place up, Christian!’ I shouted, raising my voice above the Stones cranking out ‘Respectable’.

‘You make me laugh,’ he shouted back.

‘Good!’ I said. ‘I’m glad you still get some pleasure out of me because I was starting to think that side of things was all over.’

What had James Caine called married sex? One-and-you’re-done.

‘No, I get a lot of pleasure out of you because you make me bloody laugh, Tara – the idea that your company was some adorable accident – set up to help your lonely friend – poor old Ginger! It’s all bullshit, Tara. You were always as hard as nails. You were never going to wither away and die after the journalism folded. You’re just like your old man.’

‘You make that sound like a bad thing.’

‘So stupid,’ he said, suddenly on the verge of bitter tears again. ‘Stupid! Stupid! Stupid!’

He pounded his forehead with his fists and I tried to put my arms around him.

‘I know. I know. I know.’

He shook me off.

‘Not you, Tara. Me. I’m the stupid one. I’ve been the stupid one all along. But I’ll tell you what – I’m glad that bastard is dead! He deserved to have his head smashed in! That evil fucker deserved to die!’

We must have been shouting at each other for a while because we did not hear that someone was banging on the door until Mick Jagger took it down a notch and was crooning ‘Far Away Eyes’.

When I opened the door, the police were exactly as Ginger had described them – the copper-haired slip of a girl and, behind her, the affable thug. Detective Chief Inspector Stoner grinned at me and I saw they must have been outside for a while, the music drowning out the doorbell.