I said, “We’ll do our best. You can help there, too. If you can give us all the info we need, then we can avoid asking Jenny these questions.”

She nodded, without looking up. “Well done,” I said. “Now, this has to be Ian. Am I right?” Ian was a couple of years younger than Pat, skinnier and brown-haired, but the resemblance was obvious.

“Yeah, that’s Ian. God, he looks so young there … He was really shy, back then.”

I tapped Conor’s chest. “And who’s this?”

“That’s Conor.”

It came out promptly and easily, no tension around it. I said, “He’s the guy holding Emma in her christening photo, the one in her room. He’s her godfather?”

“Yeah.” The mention of Emma made Fiona’s face tighten up. She pressed her fingertips on the photo like she was trying to push herself into it.

I said easily, moving on to the next face, “Which makes this guy Mac, right?” Chubby and bristle-haired, outflung arms and pristine white Nikes. You could have told what generation these kids were just from their clothes: no hand-me-downs, nothing mended, everything was brand-new and brand name.

“Yeah. And that’s Shona.” Red hair, the kind that would have been frizzy if she hadn’t spent a lot of time with the straighteners, and skin that I would have bet was freckled under the fake tan and careful makeup. For a strange second I almost felt sorry for these kids. When I was that age, my friends and I were all poor together; it had very little to recommend it, but at least it had involved less effort. “Her and Mac, they were the ones who could always make us laugh. I’d forgotten her looking like that. She’s blond now.”

I asked, “So you all stay in touch?” I caught myself hoping the answer was yes—not for investigative reasons, but for Pat and Jenny, stranded on their cold deserted island, sea winds blowing. It would have been good to know that some roots had held strong for them.

“Not really. I have the others’ phone numbers, but it’s been ages. I should ring them, tell them, but I just … I can’t.”

She brought her mug to her mouth to hide her face. “Leave the numbers with us,” Richie said helpfully. “We’ll do it. No reason you should have to break the news.”

Fiona nodded, without looking at him, and fumbled in her pockets for her phone. Richie ripped a page out of his notebook and passed it to her. As she wrote I asked, moving her back towards safer ground, “It sounds like you were a pretty close-knit bunch. How did you get out of touch?”

“Just life, mostly. Once Pat and Jenny and Conor went to college … Shona and Mac are a year younger than them, and me and Ian are another year, so we weren’t on the same buzz any more. They could go to pubs, and proper clubs, and they were meeting new people at college—and without the three of them, the rest of us just didn’t … It wasn’t the same.” She handed the paper and pen back to Richie. “We all tried—at first we all still saw each other all the time. It was weird because suddenly we had to schedule stuff days in advance and someone was always pulling out at the last minute, but we did hang out. Gradually, though, it just got to be less and less. Even up until a couple of years ago, we still met up for a pint every few weeks, but it just … it stopped working.”