‘She died. Long after I ran to Fiddler’s Mill, she drifted away to live with some bad people. The house she was staying in burned down while she was in it. I only heard about it because it was in a newspaper.’ When he looked at Heather again, he had composed himself. ‘And … I don’t think you should hear any more about it. It’s not healthy, lass.’

Somewhere in the trees above them, a magpie was making a racket. He looked up into the branches, smiling again.

‘I would like to tell you another story,’ he said.

Heather shrugged.

‘Once upon a time, there was a rich man who had spent all his life doing evil deeds. He had been mean, never shared his wealth, and had watched as others starved. He had hurt people for his own pleasure and enjoyed it. Then one day he had a change of heart. When his neighbour, a poor man with hungry children, came calling at his house, he promised that the poor man could have half his food and wealth if, when he died, he watched over his grave for three nights in a row. He was worried …’ Michael Reave paused, his face slack. ‘He was worried that the devil would come for his soul.’

For a long time, Reave didn’t say anything more, although Heather was sure that wasn’t the end of the story. They walked a little further, with the soft trample of the police coming along behind.

‘This doesn’t change anything, you know,’ Heather said eventually. ‘It doesn’t change who you are, or what you did.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t.’ He turned to look at her, and not for the first time Heather felt a shiver of discomfort; it was as though he looked straight to the heart of her. As though he could see down to her bones.

‘What is it?’

‘I was just thinking.’ He smiled, that rueful almost-smile made so famous by his mugshot. ‘I was just thinking that Colleen should have given me you, instead of Lyle. There’s so much more of me in you.’

It was spring. The dog roses on the cliff path were all in bloom, their soft pink and yellow heads nodding in the freshening sea breeze. Heather brushed her fingers against the petals as she passed them, plucking one or two blooms and thinking of nothing in particular until she came to the cliff’s edge. Yawning away below her was the drop, and the solid blue sea – the last thing her mother had ever seen, probably.