Silence for several hundred yards. Eventually Maggie let herself sit back against the seat. It was a minute before she spoke again.

‘At some point – at this point – you have to at least consider the possibility Josh did it.’

‘No.’

She put a hand up: Wait. ‘Sometimes – as you know, however hard it is to admit in this case – the simplest answer is the right one.’

Other cities kept a polite separation between their commercial and civic districts and the heavy industry; not Birmingham. Just two minutes and a flight of steps from the new Bull Ring and the space-age silver Selfridges building, they were into the grungy opening reaches of Digbeth.

After a blistering row one Sunday morning when Robin was thirteen or fourteen, Christine had ordered Dennis to get her out of her sight. They’d taken the little local train to Moor Street but instead of dragging her round the silverware at the museum for the nth time, he’d brought her here, local history freak that he was, on a sort of off-the-cuff walking tour of past industrial glories. ‘Emphasis on past,’ she’d said to Corinna on the phone afterwards. ‘Now it’s more like, here’s a car park, here’s a chip shop, here’s the coach station.’

‘Ah, the coach station,’ Rin said. ‘Did you see my dad?’ and Robin had kicked herself. About six months earlier, the police had brought Mr Pascoe home when, off his face, he’d lurched behind a reversing National Express and got himself a concussion and a broken collarbone. She’d forgotten.

And the ennui was fake anyway. If she was honest, a day that had started off crappy – she’d cried, then been furious with herself for showing her mother any weakness – had turned into one she remembered as great now. Dennis had had a map showing where every German bomb had fallen in central Birmingham and they’d walked the streets matching the dots – red for incendiaries – to the buildings that filled the spaces left by Victorian factories and the pubs for their workforces. ‘Just imagine what it must have been like before,’ he’d said as if he were conjuring palaces. ‘The stuff that was made here.’ At six, he’d braved Christine’s wrath and rung to say they wouldn’t be home for supper. They’d had sausages and mash at a pub instead; she’d loved it.

Robin had expected some lingering frost from Maggie – a minor spat could lead to days of coldness from Christine – but as soon as they’d reached the office, it was as if nothing had happened. She was walking briskly now, getting her exercise, filling her lungs with exhaust fumes. The secondary gift of the German bombers, Dennis had told her that day: the Inner Ring Road, a strangling noose of dual and triple carriageways round the centre of town. They’d done the demolition work.