They put Joe in the boot of Darren’s car, then they drove the Merc along the Ridgeway and onto a farm track. It was winter, and muddy, but the Downs are chalk, so they’d managed to get it into a copse without getting bogged. Torched it with petrol siphoned from the tank, hoping that when it was found it would be taken for the work of joyriders. Only it wasn’t found. The farmer had no business up there till spring, and the dirt bikes would churn up the mud, obliterating the tire tracks.

“And Joe?”

“Under Darren’s patio? I don’t know. Concreted away somewhere. He said we could never tell you, Andy. That if the police came, or anyone else, you couldn’t know, so you wouldn’t have to lie. They wouldn’t come to us. It would be you and your mum. I wish I could have told you. I can’t tell you how much I wanted to. How hard it was to be alone with you because at any moment it might come spilling out.

“But I’m not sorry. Not after I’d seen the way he was. I’m so sorry, Andy, that it happened to you. I’m still so sorry. But I wish it hadn’t happened, that I hadn’t killed him. I used to try and pretend. But I’d wake in the mornings and there it would be. This horrible, soiling, secret weight. Tons of it. The terror that I would be caught. What it would do to my parents. Having to sit there in church and listen to the sermons. Damned for who I was. Damned for what I’d done.”

I pressed Peter’s hand to my lips. I didn’t have any words.

“Mum got the photos out yesterday. She doesn’t really understand all this. They’ve got so old. The past is safer than the future. There’s a picture of me the summer after it happened. We went to a B&B in Devon. I look like a child, this gangly child, and I looked into his eyes, trying to see it, and I could, so why couldn’t anyone else? But then, there was a picture of you, Andy, a page or two on. That picnic we went to at Alton Barnes, do you remember? And you’re just a little girl, I mean, so small, and so fighty, and you’ve got a big plate of chicken legs and potato salad, and there’s that patch on your scalp you always covered, but you can see it, and the hair’s coming back, and you have this tender, hopeful look. I would do it again, a hundred times. A hundred times a hundred times.”

“Did Marcus know?”