I had held back on telling them that Gill had sought out an opportunity for contact with teenagers during the festival, and that my preliminary researches had thrown up more questions than answers. I’m not sure why I did that, though I told myself that I wanted to avoid stoking their fears. The other reason that came to me, that I was trying to keep control of the situation, made no sense unless some part of me knew that I needed to.

‘So that’s more or less it,’ the sensible side of me said, acting as my cue to leave.

But seeing Deirdre’s early life chronicled in the room’s many photographs had only made me more curious about her.

‘There’s something else. If I could, I’d like to look through Deirdre’s things, her room, if possible, to see if there’s anything there that might help. Maybe, I don’t know, some kind of evidence …’

It sounded lame, I knew, and ghoulish. They were bound to say no. Mentally, I was out the door and nearly home. But Sean darted a glance at Ann, then at me, then back at Ann again. To my surprise, she nodded.

‘Come with me,’ she said.

At the top of the stairs, she pointed at a door but didn’t open it. Instead, she turned and descended towards her husband at the foot of the stairs, his hands gripping the bannisters like they were prison bars.

If the sitting room was a shrine, the bedroom was a time capsule, a perfectly preserved late 1990s teenage museum. I flicked through a rack of CDs: Robbie Williams, Oasis and the Fugees. Cuddly toys stacked on the bed, stickers on the furniture; there was even a Furby. Though she’d lived another fifteen years, it was as if Deirdre’s life had stopped in 1998.

I batted away the questions that came to me, about why I was spending my Saturday afternoon playing Poirot in a dead woman’s room when I could have been doing anything else with my weekend, and sat on the bed. Being a solicitor contains elements of detective work – figuring out what your client isn’t telling you, and why, or divining what the opposition is planning to do – but this was different. I was trying to feel my way into who Deirdre had been – and where she might have hidden something that she didn’t want her parents to see. She had spent much of her time on earth in this room. She must have left traces of herself, and of the monstrous attack that had marked her short life.

I got up and began to work my way through the wardrobe and the chest of drawers, both of which were emptier than I had expected. Though the surfaces of the room displayed the trappings of a teenage girl, the interiors held drab and shapeless adult clothes, the shrouds of the woman Deirdre had become.