Not taking her eyes off him, Heather reached into her bag for the folder and pulled out the prints she’d had made. Each of whytewitch’s pictures and photographs had been blown up to A4 size, a little larger than the file could take, it turned out, but something about the graininess of the images made them more impressive. The first photograph she slid across the table towards him. It showed bleak fields, a cluster of tents off to the right, and Fiddler’s Mill House in the distance.

Reave looked down at the picture without moving or speaking. Heather couldn’t be sure, but she felt like he was holding something back again, as he had when he had first laid eyes on her.

‘Do these bring back any memories?’

He tipped his head to one side; a noncommittal answer.

‘I guess if you spend your formative years there, it’s difficult to forget.’ She placed the second picture on top of the first: another photograph, this one of more tents, slightly blurry people coming and going, smoke coming from several places. ‘I found these online, taken by a woman who calls herself whytewitch, would you believe. She was there at Fiddler’s Mill in the Seventies too. Do you remember her at all?’

He looked away, a flexing in his jaw that told her he was not happy. Not happy. Heather thought of her mother’s body lying broken at the bottom of a cliff, of the faces of the women who came up on a Google image search under his name. With a flourish, she produced more pictures, dumping them one on top of the other. Reave looked at them impassively, as though they were a work colleague’s boring holiday snaps.

‘She took a lot of photos back then, and she was an artist, too. She found it a very inspirational place, I guess. What did it mean to you, Michael? What did it mean to my mum?’

‘Lass, I understand your pain over your mum, I really do,’ said Reave, his voice slow, a soft parody of compassion. ‘You want to understand what she did. But perhaps there’s no understanding something like that. No understanding the fear that makes you eat your own babies, or the fear that makes you kill yourself.’

Heather said nothing.

Images of whytewitch’s paintings were next, and the one of the figure in the red coat emerging from the woods went skittering across the slippery pile, almost landing in his lap. Michael Reave looked down at it, and abruptly he was yanking on the chain around his wrists, pulling hard enough that Heather felt the bolted table jump under her hands. She yelped and scrambled back even as Reave was standing, still repeatedly yanking on the chain, apparently trying to pull the whole thing up by the roots.

‘That’s enough.’