‘Yes, but they’d know that emergency services would be called, and that would take time. By the time anyone checked the ropes at the top, after such a dramatic scene at the base – and in front of children – they could be easily back to Watendlath to pick up their car. It’s a National Trust car park, they might have CCTV. I’m looking for quite a distinctive Fiat campervan.’

‘What?’ Johnny looked at her oddly. ‘The other night, when I collected Callum and Josie from climbing, they both admired an old Fiat campervan. It was definitely the model, they’re so distinctive, and smaller than the VWs.’

‘That’s how they knew about today’s climb. Jesus. Maybe they even joined the club.’ On the road, she asked Johnny to get the number for the climbing centre and then give it to Eden House to request the member list from the centre and also to ask if their car park had CCTV.

It did.

Usually a drive to Borrowdale would be a pleasurable and relaxing experience: one of those life-affirming days where one is close to nature and thus connecting with Mother Earth. Not today. They remained in silence and Kelly knew that Johnny was hurting. Kev wasn’t just a friend. They’d climbed together all over the world, they made rescues together when Kev volunteered for mountain rescue, and they shared a love for the outdoors. It was like a drug – climbers and pursuers of similar sports were like addicts, existing in close tribes, swapping their highs and sharing their stories. But it was about Josie too. The sort of thing that she and Callum had witnessed today wasn’t something that anyone – adult or child – should ever see. Everybody saw it in the movies but in person it was different. It could derail a young life forever. Johnny should know; he’d seen it with plenty of teenaged soldiers.

Looking at shit like that was Kelly’s job and she’d trained for it, become hardened to it in some ways, but even for her, it never got easier. Seeing what can be done to a human body to make it stop working was traumatic, and the experience of Kev’s death wouldn’t leave them anytime soon. Josie had said he’d looked at her as he fell, and Kelly reckoned that in her experience, that sort of thing was worse than seeing flesh and blood come apart. It was the sort of look that could haunt dreams. She knew a child sex abuse specialist officer who looked at, and graded, indecent images of children all day, every day. She said that the image that woke her up in the night wasn’t about what was done to the kids; it was the look on their faces.