‘Then suddenly Josh was there.’ His face over the man’s shoulder. ‘He’d come looking for us – he’d heard me fall. Josh stopped him. If he hadn’t, he would have killed me, Samir. Throttled me. I don’t know if he was high or psychotic – the look in his eyes. There was a skip right by us – Josh grabbed a bit of pipe and smacked him.’

Samir’s face. ‘Why didn’t you tell me?’

Stop, the voice was screaming now. STOP.

‘Because he killed him,’ she said.

Samir closed his eyes briefly, covered his hand with his mouth. A car went past, a couple, the woman in the passenger seat. Robin caught her eye and she looked away, superior: a lovers’ tiff in the street, at their age?

‘It was defence,’ Samir said. ‘You know that. He might not even have been charged. He saw you two being attacked, he fought him off.’

‘I know that now but we were seventeen, Corinna and me, we were still at school. We were scared out of our minds.’ She paused. The street felt like a stage-set, unreal. After all these years – to say it. To say it and be done. ‘And it wasn’t just defence.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘It was, then it wasn’t. The first time he hit him, he knocked him unconscious. Out cold.’ His eyes had gone blank above her, and he’d slumped sideways onto his shoulder, then his back. ‘But he kept on hitting him.’ The arc of the pipe from high over his head, two-handed, again and again. ‘Three times – maybe four. Then Rin screamed.’ That scream – shrill, animal panic. She’d remember it for the rest of her life. ‘It stopped him – it was like she’d pulled him out of a trance.’ The pipe had dropped to the pavement, ends ringing off the tarmac one then the other, slow motion, a spinning coin coming to a stop.

‘No one came?’

‘No. The scream was so loud I thought someone would have to. But no.’

‘What did you do?’

‘We walked away. Home, to Rin’s – all the way.’

‘The pipe?’

‘Josh hid it in his coat and we dropped it in the canal off Newhall Street.’

She looked around in vain for somewhere to sit. She felt hollow, emptied out suddenly. As if she’d been carrying the story in her stomach all these years like a stone, a giant tumour, and it had finally been cut out.

‘We sat up the rest of the night in Rin’s room,’ she said. ‘Josh and Rin both threw up. We were all trembling, shaking like …’ She held her hands into the light.