“They’ve got the right shape, with the big tear drop. Same as in the picture. There were loads of them.” She coiled them up and then rubbed them on her shirt. “Mum says I should put them in bicarb.”

Peter stretched out his hand for them. “They’re heavy.”

We passed them round. By the time it reached me, the necklace was warm. It did have weight to it. The stones were square cut, apart from the teardrop, which had come from India, a gift to a Colonel Ashton from a maharaja for saving him from a tiger. Had this been real, how many carats would it have been? The settings and the clasp were tarnished, it was impossible to see the color of the original metal, but it was probably nickel, at most silver-plated.

“How do we know these aren’t the real ones?”

“Because they cost three quid?”

But if you’d laid the real necklace, also dirty, also tarnished, next to this one, I doubted I could tell them apart, the real from the fake. When David was gone, I’d trust myself even less.

Em had found them, so the first time Em hid them. We waited in the kitchen, listening to her footsteps disappear, trying to hear the creak of the stairs, of the opening of a door; and when she returned searching her face for clues, for traces of the hiding place. She did a good inscrutable. She was a good keeper of secrets.

If you found them, you hid them next time. We played it for weeks, never tiring of it, which isn’t so odd when I think about it. There are other games, far more boring games, I’ve played, games that have gone on for years on end, games played routinely, with no hope of reward.

In the beginning, when we were small, I gave Em a hard time. Some days I would speak to her, some days I wouldn’t, acting like she’d done something wrong. I told her the teapot was stupid till she stopped wearing it. I stole her lunch a week running. When we were taken for swimming lessons, I lingered in the changing rooms and put her knickers in the bin. On her pencil tin, she had Tipp-Exed the initials MF and a heart, so I told Martin Frost and he punched her on the arm.

It was malice I was after. I was waiting for the smug look on her face when she told on me. Or weakness, sobbing, Please don’t be horrid to me, Andy! I mined for them with a passion, but came up empty-handed. In the end, I gave up.

When we were thirteen, she reminded me. I was sitting on a chair in her bedroom with a towel round my neck. Em was tickling at my face with her mum’s makeup brushes, her breath warm on my skin.