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HELEN

Helen had an aunt who lived outside Pity Me, just north of Durham. She had a farm, and Helen could remember visiting one summer, feeding donkeys with bits of carrot and picking blackberries in the hedgerows. The aunt was no longer there; Helen wasn’t sure about the farm. The town was shabbier and poorer than she’d remembered and there were no donkeys to be seen, but it was small and anonymous and no one paid her any mind.

She’d found herself a job for which she was overqualified, and a small ground-floor flat with a patio at the back. It got the sun in the afternoon. When they first got to the town, they rented a house, but that only lasted a matter of weeks and then she woke up one morning and Sean was gone, so she gave the keys back to the landlord and started looking again.

She hadn’t tried to call him. She knew he wasn’t coming back. Their family was broken, it was always going to break without Patrick, he was the glue that held them together.

Her heart, too, was shattered in ways she didn’t like to think about. She hadn’t been to visit Patrick. She knew she shouldn’t even feel sorry for him—he had admitted killing his wife, murdering Nel Abbott in cold blood.

Not cold blood, no. That’s not right. Helen understood that Patrick saw things in very black-and-white terms, and that he believed, genuinely believed, that Nel Abbott was a threat to their family, to their togetherness. She was. And so he acted. He did it for Sean, and he did it for her. That’s not so cold-blooded, is it?

But every night she had the same nightmare: Patrick holding her tabby under the water. In the dream, his eyes were sealed shut but the cat’s were open, and when the struggling animal twisted its head around towards her, she saw that its eyes were bright green, just like Nel Abbott’s.

She slept badly, and she was lonely. A few days previously she had driven twenty miles to the nearest garden centre to purchase a rosemary bush. And later that day she was driving to the animal-rescue centre over in Chester-le-Street, to select a suitable cat.