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‘That first time?’ she said. ‘How did you know I would see the first note?’

‘I put it there a few times,’ he said. ‘When I was out walking the dog. I knew your schedule, so I knew roughly what time you might be passing by. Then I sat on the town green. There’s a bench which is hidden from view by some trees, but you can see the post that the note was on. I just waited for you to read it.’

‘Then you took it away?’

He nodded. ‘I didn’t know if you would take it with you, or leave it there. It didn’t really matter.’

‘And then you put one in my bag? And car? And all the other places?’

‘Of course. Who else had access to all that? It could only have been me. You spent all that time wondering who was in all those places and could get into your bag or your house or whatever, when the answer was obvious. Me. Who else, Mary?’

She looked away, but he continued.

‘The thing is, Mary, that when something like this happens people like you assume there’s some kind of master criminal behind it, someone with a kind of superpower. So when a note appears in your fridge, you don’t think, Who would have been able to put this here? No, you convince yourself it’s some kind of supervillain who can walk through walls. So you miss what’s right in front of your nose. The only person who could have done it is me.’

‘And the photo on Facebook? Was that you?’

He shook his head. ‘That was Dylan. As if I’d have done something that easily traced.’ He shrugged. ‘As it happens, it was useful, though. It created more uncertainty.’

He held up the syringe.

‘Anything more you’d like to say? Time’s a-wasting.’

There was one thing. Something she wasn’t sure she wanted to ask, but at this point there was nothing more she had to lose.

‘What about the intruder?’

‘There was no intruder.’

‘I heard them. I heard the fight.’

‘What you heard was me crashing around in the kitchen.’

‘What?’

‘I pretended to fight someone.’

She tried to picture it. Ryan, waking in the night, pretending that there was an intruder, going downstairs and acting out a fight scene.

Her, coming down to see him, to hear from him that their dog had been killed by the intruder.

But there was no intruder.

Bile rose in her throat. She tried to bite it back, but she could not. Vomit splashed onto her thighs.

‘Wally?’ she said, eventually. ‘It was you?’

‘Yeah.’ He sniffed. ‘I always hated that fucking dog.’

Another Mystery Remained

One mystery was solved, at least. Who had done it.

The answer was shocking: it was her husband, Ryan. The man she had married five years ago, had shared her bed with, had shared her life with.

Had trusted with her children.

He had done all of this. He had killed their dog.