The air settled down over them, still and heavy.

Bex felt a spark of anger, and the part of her that was drifting above looking down was glad that she still had it in her. ‘So he’s a rapist now, is he? I thought it was all my fault.’

‘I was upset about Lucas.’

Bex took the sugar bowl, grabbed a teaspoon and started making patterns in the white granules. Nobody spoke.

Finally Bex looked up at Kirsty. ‘I won’t tell the child about the rape, so that doesn’t matter.’

‘You wouldn’t be able to keep a secret like that,’ Kirsty said.

‘Or we could find out who it was,’ Bex said. ‘And … do something.’

‘You can’t use your baby as evidence in a rape case,’ Aunt Janet said. ‘It’s not fair.’ And that at least was true.

And anyway, Bex had tried to go to the police and she’d failed at the first hurdle. When she’d heard the cops joking about how shaggable some young woman was, she’d freaked and bottled it and gone home. She wasn’t going through that again.

‘You’d passed out,’ Kirsty said. ‘How could we do something? Can you imagine what the police would say? We didn’t report it at the time, it’s your word against his, and you don’t even remember what happened. It wouldn’t even count as rape.’

Bex looked again at Kirsty and felt that familiar shift inside her. Kirsty’s expression was wrong. ‘Do you know, Kirsty? Do you know who it was? Who raped me? You need to tell me.’

Kirsty looked straight at her and her expression changed to concerned, as abruptly as a TV channel-change. ‘Of course not, Bex. I told you. You said you’d seen the Pale Child, we all went off looking for her, and then we came back and found you. I know it wasn’t Lucas. He was with me the whole time. I don’t know about the other two.’

‘But you said my dress was rucked up. Did you know what had happened? Did you see who it was?’

Bex had been over it in her head so many times. She’d humiliated Daniel, laughed at him. He’d been furious with her. They said rape was more about power than sex. And Gary – he was used to getting what he wanted, and she’d sensed a darkness in him.

‘No!’ Kirsty said. ‘We’d all split up, apart from me and Lucas. We came back when it started lashing it down, and you’d passed out. You were cold and we had to get you home.’ She spat the final words. ‘You know the rest.’