Abbott was later told that Chris had most likely been swept out to sea. For his family it was the beginning of a slow, unspoken slide into domestic dysfunctionality marked by his parents’ gradual withdrawal from everyday life, both coping-but-not-really-coping with the death of their eldest. They had moved from Matlock to Burton-on-Trent, hoping that a change of scene might help. Maybe it did, but if so, the effect was microscopic, a case of delaying the inevitable, which was the break-up of the Abbott marriage. As for Alex, he started life at a new school where he met the girl who was to become the love of his life: Tess – Tess Lacey to give her her full name.

Looking back, he knew it was weird that they’d ever wound up together. He and Tess were such different animals. The young Alex Abbott . . . Well, you wouldn’t exactly say that he had turned to crime, but he didn’t go the other way either. He became the kind of tearaway who was known to the police but not the magistrates, and more than once he was delivered home in a squad car, long-suffering coppers knocking on his door, delivering him back to parents who were only semi-interested in his whereabouts, being too preoccupied with arguing, drinking, grieving – skills that Abbott, in later life, would acquire in full. His time in a remand home had done a lot to repair the damage. Inside the home he was told, ‘We’ve seen your sort before, mate, and we’ll see you again,’ to which his dad had said, ‘Well, son, you prove them wrong, then.’

A rare moment of coherent parenting from his old man. And it worked. Because Abbott had proven them wrong. He had. Getting out of remand school, he pledged never to darken the police station door again, and one thing about Abbott, when he put his mind to something . . .

Tess had always stood by him. And if she was a little bit titillated by her jailbird boyfriend, and secretly loved the fact that it scandalised her parents, that didn’t matter, because she loved him properly. He knew she did.

Just not quite enough to marry him. His was a proposal borne more out of hope than expectation and, sure enough, she turned him down. Tess, after all, was bound for Oxford University. She loved Abbott. And who knows, perhaps she did see some future in the relationship beyond uni. Just that she never let on, being Tess. If the world is split into dog people and cat people – dog people needing love and affection, giving it in return, getting kicked and coming back for more; cat people, inscrutable and unreadable, much more selective with their affection – then he was a dog person, Tess was a cat person. Perhaps they were destined never to be together.