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negotiating with the letting agents when she didn’t even know who they were because she’d been locked in a mental unit, having daily therapy while he was approving the inventory, checking references, having to live with his mum and dad, parent Bonnie and work full-tim e . . . It was as though she felt she could never make it u p to him.
    Often, Patrick also thought that she never would be able to. ‘Does it matter now?’ he said, more testily than he had intended. ‘We’ve got the house back.’
    Gill sat back and held her arms wide for Bonnie to sit in the V-shape made by her outstretched legs. She gazed at him thoughtfully. ‘Yes. But we aren’t all living in it, are we?’ Bonnie snuggled into her lap, sucking her thumb, and Patrick regarded the two pairs of identical hazel eyes scrutinising him.
    He stood up and walked away, cursing his cowardice.
    ‘I’m still not ready, Gill,’ he said, without looking at her. When he glanced back from the kitchen, she was hugging Bonnie silently, dropping her lips to Bonnie’s soft brown hair. Patrick felt like a heel. She must know how hard it was for him to live with his mum and dad and have to share a room with Bonnie, and yet he still didn’t want to come home. That must be making her feel terrible, he thought.
    He put the kettle on, for something to do, and stood at the kitchen counter listening to the water heat up as Bonnie chatted obliviously to Gill in the next room. She seemed to be telling her about some penguins she knew. Patrick smiled, then the smile dropped away as he realised that every day he prevaricated was another day Bonnie was being deprived of her mother’s continuous and stabilising presence.
    It was doing his head in. Why could he not just go for it? Fling himself back into the marriage, for Bonnie’s sake if no-one else’s?
    Throwing tea bags into two mugs, he did what he always did when his thoughts reached this impasse: he thought about something else instead.
    He remembered the vigil last night. All those big versions of what Bonnie would become all too soon – little girls in almost-adult bodies and scaled-down adult clothes – well, prostitutes’ clothes, in many cases. He grinned briefly, thinking that he sounded just like his mother.
    The girls last night had been torn between simmering post-gig euphoria – bordering on hysteria – and the pressure to be hushed and respectful. Patrick suspected that the murder of one of their own was making these girls feel even more excited, blood and hormones at boiling point, than they would at the end of a normal OnTarget gig. At least he and Carmella hadn’t had to sit through the gig themselves. When he’d found out that the vigil was taking place, he’d decided that their attendance at the actual concert wasn’t necessary. The vigil had been an unexpected bonus – a great chance to talk to the girls in his official capacity.
    Many of them had got so hot from dancing and screaming inside the stadium that they had stripped down to tiny crop tops and removed the tights that they’d probably sported at the start of the evening in the chill February air. Half-naked, flushed girls holding lit candles was definitely at odds with the funereal atmosphere and Rose’s poor crying parents. He had looked around him at the thirty or forty girls who were all gaping at him as though he’d been beamed down from Mars, trying to spot anyone who seemed particularly uncomfortable or as if they had something to say. But even when he’d exhorted them to come forward, none of them had appeared flustered or anything other than curious, or ghoulishly fascinated by the whole affair.
    Surely one of them must know something. Why had Rose gone to that hotel? Had she been dating an older man – the sort of man who would invite her up to a hotel room? He’d asked her mum, but Sally Sharp had been utterly convinced that Rose had no time for boys her own age, let alone older men. Rose had been a young fifteen