Dennis had tried to stop her but at six thirty, she’d turned on Midlands Today. It had been the top story, trailed over the pulsing theme music. ‘Police launch a murder enquiry after an Edgbaston house fire leaves a woman dead and her son with life-threatening injuries.’ A preview of other stories to come – three teenagers jailed for a knife attack; a planning controversy; a woman looking for a bone-marrow donor – and then straight to it. Nick Owen – silver-haired, kind-eyed. He’d been the presenter since they were at school, it had to be twenty years, and now he was saying Corinna’s name.

He cut to a reporter at the scene. Russell Road, where Rin and Josh lived, was busy, the woman talking over a hum of rush-hour traffic, but the houses themselves were set back behind a verge lined with trees and a small service road now cordoned off. The reporter was a few feet outside the tape, backed by a fire investigation van and a square white forensics tent. They had a uniform at the foot of Corinna’s driveway.

Floodlights blazed over the area, and the bare February branches gave the scene a weird gothic beauty. But then the reporter had turned aside, the camera panned out and they saw the house itself. Across the room, Christine had gasped.

When she was little, Lennie had called Corinna and Josh’s the ‘snowman house’. Built in the Thirties with some Deco influence, its white stucco façade looked out from under the hat of a steep dark-tiled roof like a cheeky face, or – with the small round porthole just under the roofline – a winking emoticon. A long stained-glass window – the carrot – lit the central stairs, and the bigger, horizontal windows of the bedrooms made the eyes.

The glass was gone, shattered by the heat, and the eyes were black and gaping, lascivious soot tongues licking over the stucco above each one. The size of them – the flames must have been eight or nine feet high. The creepers either side of the front door were burned to a network of fine charcoal, intricate etchings across a face now rendered macabre, a painted Mexican skull for the Day of the Dead.

Just visible against the evening sky, beyond the reach of the floodlights, was a hole at the apex of the roof, the supporting timber burned away, tiles collapsing inward like fish-scales. Peter. The skylights were at the back of the house, Robin knew, one over the back stairs, the other – the one he must surely have jumped from – in his room, over his bed, surrounded by his glow-stars. She imagined his terror at waking to find the house on fire around him. Had his door been open? Had it come into his room? The smell; the sheer noise: roaring flame, groaning timbers, the shattering glass.