As soon as he’s left, she turns to me. ‘Our brother.’ She shakes her head, her face pale. She’s taking deep breaths and I can tell she’s trying to control herself.

‘I feel as sick as you do,’ I tell her, taking her hand and leading her to the sofa by the back door. My stomach has been churning for the last seventeen hours. ‘Tell me what the police said to you. I don’t really know any details.’

As we sit she tells me what little she knows. That this morning Danny was taken to Dorset to be questioned regarding Iona’s death.

‘From where?’ I ask but she shrugs, shaking her head.

‘I don’t know, and I’m not sure what evidence they have. It must be pretty substantial.’

‘Bonnie,’ I say, realising she doesn’t know everything, ‘he walked into a police station and admitted it. I’m sorry, I thought you knew.’

She pulls her hand away and swivels on the sofa until she is glaring at me. ‘No. God. I didn’t.’

‘But I don’t get why he would have done it,’ I say. ‘It doesn’t make any sense.’ Every time I think of the possibility that my brother could have killed Iona, waves of nausea surge through me.

‘The bastard. The bloody bastard. Why would he kill her?’

‘I thought he liked her.’ I slip off my shoes, pulling my feet on to the sofa and hugging my knees against me. This is what I can’t stop playing out in my head. That every time they were together, I believed Danny liked her.

‘He was obsessed with her. And that’s a big difference to liking someone as a normal person would. We should have known,’ Bonnie says. ‘Urrgh. You remember that bird, don’t you?’

I nod, feeling sick as I had then.

‘Mum was picking feathers out of Danny’s jumper for days. Even she didn’t know what to say for once.’

‘He said he’d found it like that,’ I murmur, though his story had conflicted with the one Iona told Bonnie, and I’d seen his drawing for myself. The bird didn’t look right. It was so unlike his other pictures.

‘We should have guessed he’d do something like this one day,’ Bonnie says. ‘I just never thought he already had.’

‘Bonnie, don’t talk like that.’

‘You’re not seriously defending him?’ she spits out. ‘You’ve just told me he’s admitted it. He’s kept this a secret for twenty-five years and, shit, our parents must have, too.’ She hangs her head in her hands, her fingers digging into her skull. ‘I thought it was my fault. All this time and I thought it was my fault we left.’

‘What do you mean?’ I bend my head to look at her. ‘Why would you think it was your fault?’

‘It doesn’t matter.’

‘Yes, it does—’