‘And she’d never have let him in,’ I point out.
‘She might have thought it was me, that I’d forgotten something,’ Jack says.
‘You’d use your key.’
‘Forgotten that, then – I don’t know.’ He casts about. ‘We had a prowler.’
‘What? When?’
‘Wednesday night. There’d been a break-in at number eight on Tuesday.’ Two doors down. ‘Lizzie saw someone in our back garden.’
‘Was it Litton?’
‘She said not, not tall enough, more like a kid, she thought, though she didn’t see his face,’ Jack says. ‘The police came round on the Thursday morning – I told them then.’
‘Have they caught him?’
‘We never heard anything.’
I rub my forehead. Could it be this prowler and not Litton?
‘They always look at the husband, don’t they?’ he says.
My stomach turns over. ‘They have to. They can’t possibly think…’ Shock stings around my wrists.
‘No,’ he says, ‘they know I wasn’t there. But having to go over it and over it. I tried to wake her…’ He puts the mug on the floor, covers his face, shoulders shaking.
I go to him, sit on the arm of the sofa and hug him tight.
Light steals into the room, hurting my eyes.
Kay comes back; she hasn’t slept either. Is she used to it – all-nighters for work?
‘Did they say how she died?’ I ask Jack. I know there was blood. Too much blood.
‘They said the post-mortem would confirm it.’ Jack’s mouth trembles as he speaks. ‘Blunt trauma?’ He looks at Kay, as if checking he’s said it correctly.
‘Blunt force trauma,’ she says. ‘That’s what we think at the moment.’
‘With what?’ I can’t imagine.
Did you bring a weapon with you? A baseball bat or a cosh of some sort? Then it occurs to me that perhaps you used your fists. That feels worse. Was it the first time you’d killed someone? And why pick Lizzie? What did you come to the house for? Money? To steal? To rape? How did you get in?
I go outside for air, out the back. The garden glitters with dew, spiderwebs and lines hang on the shrubs around the border. The air is damp and cool and my windpipe hurts as I draw some in. A pair of coal tits are on the peanut feeder in the magnolia tree. The sky is blue, blushing pink in the east. That slice of moon still visible. Milky stalks out and sits under the tree. The tits ignore him. How can it all be here, just so? It all feels too bright and clear, too high-definition, as though I’ve wandered on to a film set.
On the roof of the terraced row at the back, three magpies bounce and chatter. A crow joins them, edging along to the chimney, then another. And two more.
