When I arrived back at the house, I felt worse than I had before. My brain was buzzing with the thoughts I was trying to suppress. I ran up the stairs and walked into my room. Melanie was there. She gave a little jump. She gave me an uncertain smile. I looked around. The room seemed different.

‘You startled me,’ she said.

‘What are you doing here?’

‘Dario let me in,’ she said.

‘But what are you doing here?’

‘Look,’ she said, handing me some tickets. ‘They’re tickets for the Chelsea Flower Show. Someone at work gave them to me. We could go.’

I stared at them blankly. ‘Why would I want to go to a flower show?’

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘I thought…’

I looked again at the room. ‘What have you done?’

She started to stammer. ‘I brought some things round. Wind chimes. Some flowers. I did a bit of tidying, got some things out.’

I walked over to her and put my right hand round her neck, quite gently. I pushed her backwards slowly. Then, when she was close to the wall, I gave her a shove, so that she banged her head. Not so that any damage was done but quite hard. Her eyes became wet with tears. I did it again.

‘Davy,’ she said, barely able to speak.

‘Don’t,’ I said.

I let her go and she started to cough.

‘Get out,’ I said.

‘No, Davy, please.’

Now I spoke more quietly, touching her cheek as I did so in very gentle slaps, little more than a whisper against her flesh. ‘You don’t touch my stuff.’ Slap. ‘You don’t come in without asking me.’ Slap. ‘Understand?’ Slap.

She nodded.

‘Now get out. I’ll call you.’

Almost in a dream she left and I heard her footsteps on the stairs. I lay down on the bed but jumped up almost immediately when there was a sharp knock on the door. I opened it. Astrid was standing there. She was wearing three-quarter-length brown jeans and a red top. She looked concerned. ‘I saw Mel on the stairs,’ she said. ‘Is anything wrong?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘Come in.’

She stepped inside and prowled round the room, looking as if she was scarcely conscious of where she was.

‘Are you all right?’ I said.

‘I’ve just been seeing a mad psychiatrist,’ she said.

I tried to look sympathetic. ‘Is there a problem?’

‘The police sent me. He’s supposed to be an expert at profiling murderers.’

I felt a shiver. I tried to think of how an averagely interested person would respond. ‘How did he…’ I began. ‘I mean what does he think?’

‘A scarred leather worker,’ she said. ‘If you meet one, let me know.’

I almost laughed with relief, then looked at my left hand. I was still holding the stupid tickets. Astrid was the only person I knew who was interested in gardens. ‘I’ve got something for you,’ I said. ‘I thought it might cheer you up.’

I made up a story about having been given the tickets at work. She seemed about as unexcited by it as I had been when Melanie gave them to me, but she was quite polite. She asked if she needed to wear a hat, as if she were looking for an excuse to get out of it. Then she gave an obviously forced smile and leaned forward and gave me a kiss on the cheek, the sort you might give an old aunt, and said thank you. I knew she wouldn’t go. She’d find an excuse. It was probably for the best. What if she met Melanie and mentioned it to her? I wondered if it would have been different if I’d been disdainful of Astrid. Would that have made her want me? The trouble is, it doesn’t work like that. You have to really not care about them to make them like you. If I had pretended not to like Astrid, she would have been exactly as she was now: treating me as part of the scenery. She would be nice enough to me but she wouldn’t notice if I wasn’t there.

As she walked round the room, she touched things and commented on them. She flicked at the wind chimes, she picked up a silk scarf Melanie had left and ran it through her fingers. She stopped in front of the mantelpiece and only at that moment did I notice that, in tidying my room, Melanie had found the glass paperweight I had taken from Ingrid de Soto ’s house. She had taken it from the drawer and put it in full view. All I needed was for Astrid to move on and I could put it back out of sight. But she stopped in front of it, as if lost in thought. I was about to say her name, to distract her, but before I could speak she picked it up and rotated it in her hand, holding it up to the light, as if fixing it for ever in her memory. The colours shimmered.

‘Paperweights never have paper underneath them, do they?’

I mumbled something noncommittal. We talked nonsense for a few seconds. I think she said something about looking for a place to live. I couldn’t really hear. The words were drowned by the hiss of static in my head. She handed me the paperweight and I put it back carefully on the mantelpiece, her eyes on it all the time. She said she was going dancing.

‘Nice,’ I said, and stayed silent. I wanted to tell her that she mustn’t let Owen touch her again. Not a kiss. Not a caress. Nothing. Or else.

I was left alone, staring at the paperweight. Melanie wouldn’t remember it, but Astrid would. It wasn’t fair. This wasn’t the way I’d planned it. I wasn’t like this. I wasn’t really a murderer. All I ever wanted was to begin again, and be allowed to be myself at last. No, it wasn’t fair.

Chapter Thirty-eight

There was so much to do and so many small details to attend to. It was my job to hold everything together in my head, and I knew that if I let one thing slip, that could be my undoing. And once I had started, the clock was ticking and I couldn’t stop it. I found that I was good in a crisis.

As the household fell apart, it became comically easy to carry out what I had planned without being noticed. I was invisible. Leah was glaring at Miles. Miles was looking at Astrid and trying not to pay any attention to Leah. Owen was looking at Astrid too. Astrid was looking back at Owen and, although she didn’t yet know it, she was also witnessing the spectacle that was being played out in front of her eyes. Pippa was watching herself, as usual. Dario wasn’t looking at all, and when he was he clearly wasn’t noticing. He was even worse after he was beaten up. Fear made him even more addled. Who knew what Mick saw? Mel was looking at me, all right, but Mel was a fool: she only saw what she wanted to see. I was looking at everything, at everyone. I was waiting, poised to strike when the time was right. In the meantime, it was me who called the journalists about Astrid, me who stirred up Leah’s hatred. I was calling the shots now.

On the evening of the house sale, it seemed to me that everything was working out. I provoked some suspicion here and created some hostility there, all the while pretending to be nice Davy, peacemaker Davy, dull, dependable, sweet Davy. I almost felt like telling them the truth, just to see the expressions on their faces. I was like a magician who wanted to show them how the trick was done, how easily they had been fooled.

I steered Pippa towards Leah’s bag of clothes and Dario towards Miles’s shoes. As the noise grew and the violence started to turn ugly, I casually pushed Astrid’s bike into the middle of the yard, where it was whisked away. As an afterthought, I stuffed the takings into my pocket – much more than I’d expected, thanks to the run on Leah’s clothes – and threw the box into the bushes.

In front of the house where the sale was out of control, it felt like a forest fire. I just had to stand back. Leah struggled with a large black woman in the middle of a crowd. Dario and Pippa watched her, enjoying the disaster. Owen was taking photographs. I stepped forward and put my hand on Leah’s shoulder, Davy, trying to help. I felt something jingle at my feet and looked down. Carefully I knelt and picked up the bunch of keys Leah had dropped. I put them into my pocket. Now, what could I do with them?