I followed Bex down the hallway into a large room lined with portraits of judgemental old men, and stuffed with antique and no doubt priceless furniture. I sat on a small sofa which had clearly been designed for scrawny Victorians who saw sitting down as a moral weakness. Bex sat on a second sofa by a bay window. A beam of sunlight made a bright, shimmery lozenge on the parquet floor. I felt a glimmer of hope that I hadn’t been wrong about Daniel after all. Maybe it had never been him. Maybe he’d been framed.

Tony appeared a few minutes later, handed us the drinks, and headed for the door.

‘Hang on!’ When Bex raised her voice, I could hear the croak in it from shouting and breathing smoke. ‘Dad, hang on. We need to talk.’

‘Oh dear, that sounds ominous.’ He came back into the room and sat on a wing-back chair.

‘What’s the matter with Kirsty?’ Bex said.

‘You know what’s the matter with her – she’s lying in a coma in the hospital.’

Bex sighed. ‘Have you been honest with me about anything, Dad? In my whole life?’

Tony was very still, looking at Bex through narrowed eyes. ‘Honest about what?’ I felt like an intruder. This was a drama playing out between Bex and her father. But I needed to know. What if Kirsty was behind everything and Daniel had just been a pawn? I sipped my coffee. He’d put whisky in mine too, which was welcome.

‘About Kirsty,’ Bex said. ‘A massive file full of letters from psychiatrists – and I know nothing. So what the hell’s the matter with her?’

‘Why are you doing this, Bex? Your sister is fighting for her life.’

‘Because I want the truth! What’s wrong with her that you never told me?’

‘She’s fine now. She’s grown out of it. She had some problems as a child, that’s all.’

‘What problems?’

‘I dealt with it. She’s fine.’

‘It says she had callous and unemotional traits. It doesn’t sound fine. It sounds decidedly not-fine to me.’

‘It sounds worse than it was,’ Tony said. ‘Our family have always been unemotional. That’s why we’ve been so successful in business. You can’t succeed in this world if you spend your whole time worrying about other people. You can’t breed pigs for a living if you’re over-emotional. The over-emotional children are the worst. Daniel was one of those. And now look what he’s done. Killed Violet and Gary.’

‘I never knew Daniel was difficult.’

‘You weren’t here.’

Bex gulped the last of her drink and slammed the cup onto the antique table next to her. ‘No! Because you sent me away! You didn’t want me.’

‘It wasn’t like that.’

‘So what was it like, Dad?’