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quote marks in the air—have been much less common than male ones until now, but that he is certain there will be more in due course, more women who kill their children and themselves. Across his chest, a caption appears: ‘Professor Keith Harbard, University College London, Author of Homewreckers: Extreme Killing Within the Family ’. He is talking more than anyone else; the other speakers try and fail to interrupt his flow. I wonder what he would classify as a moderate killing.
    The woman sitting beside him, my MP, accuses him of scare-mongering, says he has no business making such grim predictions on the basis of no evidence. Does he know how counterintuitive it is for a mother to kill her own offspring? This case, she says, if indeed it does turn out to be murder-suicide, is a freak occurrence, will always be a freak occurrence.
    ‘Mothers do kill their own kids, though.’ Nick joins in the debate. ‘What about that baby that was thrown off a ninth-floor balcony?’
    It’s all I can do to stop myself from screaming at him to shut up. At all of them. None of them knows anything about this. I don’t know anything about it. Except . . .
    I say nothing. Nick has never been suspicious of me and he must never be. I shiver as I imagine something terrible happening to my own family. Not as terrible as this, what’s on the news, but bad enough: Nick leaving me, taking the kids every other weekend, introducing them to his new wife. No. That can’t happen. I must behave as if my connection with this story is the same as Nick’s: we are both concerned strangers with no personal knowledge of the Brethericks.
    Suddenly the discussion is over, and there is a man on the screen, with an older man and woman on either side of him. All three of them are crying. The man in the middle is speaking into a microphone at a press conference. ‘Are they relatives?’ I ask Nick. Mark would be too upset to talk about the deaths of his wife and daughter. These people must be close friends, perhaps his parents and brother. I know he has a brother. There’s no family resemblance, though. This man has dark brown hair with streaks of grey in it, sallow skin. His eyes are blue, with heavy lids, and his nose is large and long, his lips thin. He is unusual-looking but not unattractive. Perhaps these are Geraldine’s relatives.
    ‘I loved Geraldine and Lucy with all my heart,’ says the younger of the two men, ‘and I will always love them, even now they’re gone.’
    Why didn’t Mark tell me his wife was the image of me? Did he think it would make me angry? Make me feel used?
    ‘Poor sod,’ says Nick.
    The man at the microphone is sobbing now. The older man and woman are holding him up. ‘Who is he?’ I ask. ‘What’s his name?’
    Nick looks at me strangely. ‘That’s the madwoman’s husband, ’ he says.
    I am about to tell him he’s wrong—this man is not Mark Bretherick, looks nothing like him—when I remember that I am not supposed to know this. The official story, the one Mark and I drafted together, is that we never met. I remember us laughing about this, Mark saying, ‘Although obviously I won’t go round saying I’ve never met or heard of a woman called Sally Thorning, because that’d be a bit of a giveaway!’
    The madwoman’s husband. Nick is laid-back about day-to-day life, but I’ve never met anyone more black and white about anything that qualifies as an important issue. He wouldn’t understand at all if I told him, and who could blame him?
    I say quietly, ‘I don’t think that’s the husband, is it?’ Impartial, uninvolved.
    ‘Of course it’s the husband. Who do you think he is, the milkman?’
    As Nick speaks, another caption appears, black letters on a strip of blue that cuts the weeping man with the long nose and heavy-lidded eyes in half. My mouth opens as I read the words: ‘Mark Bretherick, husband of Geraldine and father of Lucy’.
    Except that he isn’t. He can’t be. I know, because I