“You said to me that you’d found them on their own together.”

“I was looking after you.

After everything you’d been put through to get children at all—”

That is the first time in the whole of that morning that anybody established what she had actually said on the telephone, and it was not me who established it.

I could not have.

I was not on the call.

She had told him she had caught us alone.

Which means that at some point between twenty past nine and half past, in a telephone call of eight to eleven minutes, a woman standing in her own kitchen told her son that she had personally come upon his wife and his friend alone together — and then sent him, as corroboration, a photograph taken at a barbecue attended by some thirty people, including him.