“My sister,” he said eventually. “My older sister. Only she wasn’t just that. My father, your granddad, was a sick man, and he infected the whole house with his sickness. My sister was born in 1947, her name was … Evie.” He stopped. Saying her name seemed to cause him some physical pain. “And then when she got a little older, when she’d just turned thirteen, Evie had me.”

Heather looked down at her hands, feeling sick. She thought of Ben Parker telling her that killers had almost always experienced abuse.

“The woman who called herself my mother, she hated me for it,” continued Reave. “I was a sign of everything that was wrong with our family, lass, do you see? And Evie, I think she tried to make up for it, for how much her mother hated me. But she only knew one way of expressing that. Because of what had been done to her. She would come to me, at night.” He paused, shuddering. “I still remember her standing in my bedroom door, in her red coat. Smiling. She said she just wanted to love me.”

“What happened to her? To Evie?”

“She died. Long after I ran to Fiddler’s Mill, she drifted away to live with some bad people. The house she was staying in burned down while she was in it. I only heard about it because it was in a newspaper.” When he looked at Heather again, he had composed himself. “And … I don’t think you should hear any more about it. It’s not healthy, lass.”

Somewhere in the trees above them, a magpie was making a racket. He looked up into the branches, smiling again.

“I would like to tell you another story,” he said.

Heather shrugged.

“Once upon a time, there was a rich man who had spent all his life doing evil deeds. He had been mean, never shared his wealth, and had watched as others starved. He had hurt people for his own pleasure and enjoyed it. Then one day he had a change of heart. When his neighbor, a poor man with hungry children, came calling at his house, he promised that the poor man could have half his food and wealth if, when he died, he watched over his grave for three nights in a row. He was worried …” Michael Reave paused, his face slack. “He was worried that the devil would come for his soul.”

For a long time, Reave didn’t say anything more, although Heather was sure that wasn’t the end of the story. They walked a little further, with the soft trample of the police coming along behind.

“This doesn’t change anything, you know,” Heather said eventually. “It doesn’t change who you are, or what you did.”

“No,” he said. “It doesn’t.” He turned to look at her, and not for the first time Heather felt a shiver of discomfort; it was as though he looked straight to the heart of her. As though he could see down to her bones.