Her shoulders crumpled, her hands came down and she said, ‘Oh, thank God,’ in a huge breath of relief, breaking out into a wider smile than I’d seen her give in a long time. She started to move towards me, but stopped when she heard the steel in my voice.

‘What are you doing here, Erin?’

‘Have you talked to Michael yet?’ Her tone was unexpected, a mixture of confusion and surprise, as if everything should have been, after my cryptic adversarial conversation with my brother, pretty straightforward. ‘Did he tell you about Alan?’

‘He told me about Alan.’

‘Okay. So . . .’ Again, she paused as if she’d filled in enough of the blanks, before realising she had to really spell it out, putting on her gentle teacher’s voice. ‘How do you feel about it?’

‘I don’t know what I believe.’ There was no point lying to Erin; she was always better at it than me. I know, I know – it sounds like a pithy remark to put in a book where she has no right of reply, but it is true. Besides, she was the one who had the affair.

‘There’s a dead man next to us,’ she said bluntly.

‘You know, I’d noticed.’

‘This wasn’t an accident, Ern, like the resort owner wants us to believe. That’s just so everyone doesn’t panic. But you and I, we know that this is a Cunningham problem. Brought here by Cunninghams . . .’ She didn’t say it, but the rest of the sentence lingered: committed by Cunninghams.

I relented slightly. ‘If I believe Michael, the man who killed my father, Alan, is already dead. That story’s finished. What else is there?’

‘If?’

‘I believe he believes it – that’s it for now.’

The memory of the webbed clearing chilled me. Perhaps that was part of my refusal to accept what Michael had told me: Alan might seem villainous on paper, but I was the only one there that morning and I didn’t want his death, his murder, to be justified – no matter who he was or what he’d done.

‘It’s simple, though. Alan killed your father to cover his arse, sure, but he was killing for something.’ Erin clicked her tongue as she processed everything. ‘Then he tries to sell that same thing to Michael, and that gets us here.’

‘Michael told me that already. But why wait so long?’

‘Maybe because Alan’s career was gone. Maybe he was desperate. All I know is, if it was worth killing over half a lifetime ago, it’s worth killing over now.’ She gestured with a thumb at Green Boots. ‘Need I, again, point to the aforementioned corpse?’

‘Okay then. What was this information Michael was buying from Alan?’

‘I don’t know.’ She hesitated. ‘He wouldn’t tell me. Said it wasn’t safe.’