years and I know what actual fear sounds like in a voice. So I asked her, very carefully, what she had heard.
“Sunday night. When you were on nights. He was in the utility room.”
And then: “He said after you dropped him off it would all be taken care of. He said it’d look like a gas leak.”
For days he had been telling me the water heater was playing up and that I was not to touch the valves. He said somebody was coming out. Nobody ever came.
And three weeks earlier he had talked me into a joint life policy for eight hundred and fifty thousand.
And he had been asking about my shift pattern, and about Nia’s school hours, and how quickly accidental-death claims pay out.
“Nia. Get down and stay out of sight.”
I went up into the multi-storey instead of going home and put
