50

It is only a matter of days before he turns up at the restaurant. Of course, of course he arrives, right when he used to, at close to midnight, just as she is hanging the glasses up, warm from the dishwasher. It is just like the first time he arrived. The fear is just the same.

His face is at the window, just how it was, all those weeks ago, when this whole business began. He is framed in one complete window, a floating head. He looks thinner than before, if that’s possible, his brow creased, his hair whiter. He must be motioning for her to open the front door, because she sees a movement in the night, his arm flapping in his Matalan anorak.

God, he really is too thin. She can see his cheekbones, like he’s wasting. She could invite him in, feed him up – really, what’s changed? He’s never tried to harm her, never.

No, she tells herself. She recites the evidence against him in her mind. She will be strong. She will not let him in. She turns away from him and back to the dishwasher.

He raps on the window.

He knew how she’d died.

He moves to a second window, presses his face to the glass.

He’d done it before.

Izzy busies herself in the kitchen and, eventually, he shouts her name, ringing out clear in the warm night.

‘No,’ she cries out, wanting, childishly, to put her hands over her ears, for him – for this dilemma – to go away forever.

She walks to the letter box and prises it open with her fingers, the metal cool on the tips of her hand. ‘Please go away,’ she says, out into the night. A stream of warm air drifts inwards.

‘Why?’ he says. He comes to the letter box, too, and his eyes meet hers, framed in the rectangular box.

‘I know about what you said as Mum’s body was found. I know about the strangling, I know it all,’ she says. ‘Don’t contact me again or I will call the police.’

She lets the metal slam shut, removing her fingers just in time. The sound seems to reverberate around the restaurant. She shivers, wrapping her arms around her body, wondering if her mother had an encounter exactly like this, right before she died.

Izzy doesn’t get frightened often. She’s never allowed herself to be. Where some people may spend the rest of their lives living in fear after something like her mother’s murder, Izzy never did. The worst had already happened, she reasoned. Or rather, the worst could happen – the very worst – so there was no need to rehearse it. Move on, she used to say to herself, always parenting herself inside her head.

But now, standing alone in the kitchen, too frightened to even reach into her handbag for her phone, too frightened to move, staring at her father, his face once again framed in the glass window, Izzy is frightened, after eighteen years of peace.

She is frightened for her life.