‘Of course. They treated it as a missing person. Whether it was because they were in on it, I don’t know, but it looked like Jeremy had gotten out of the car to go and get help for you and Michael. I had to play along with it. I cut my forehead on the glass but the window was already broken. A five-year-old wouldn’t get far, they kept saying. And then, as more days passed, I could tell they’d changed their thinking from not getting far to not lasting long and they’re running a search that I know is a dead-end. Meanwhile Alan keeps on asking me for the photographs, and I tell him I don’t have them, that I can’t find them. And he says he believes me . . .’ She looked up at me, and her eyes were red rimmed. ‘He says he believes me, but there’s only one way to be sure I wasn’t keeping the photos to myself. They had to know for sure . . .’

She trailed off, but her meaning was clear. The only way to be sure Audrey wasn’t hiding the photos was to carry through on their threat, and to leave the threat lingering for her two remaining children. I felt sick at the thought of Jeremy buried in another policeman’s coffin. It occurred to me that I didn’t know for sure the child’s body I’d found was Rebecca’s.

‘I never meant to take sides, Mum.’ I reflected on her telling me I’d been making the same mistakes my father had, and I understood her a little better now. I felt her hand, until now only resting on mine, clasp tightly. ‘I was trying to do what was right. But there’s right and then there’s right for us. I didn’t know you’d had to pay so high a price.’

It’s all well and good for the heroes to play cops and robbers in novels and on TV, but in real life it’s the side characters, the Cunninghams, who take the blows, who bear the pain, so someone else can raise their arms aloft in victory. My father had tried to do the ‘right thing’. And it had cost him. It hadn’t cost the rich couple grieving their stolen child. It hadn’t cost the detective, pushing her informant with a promotion in mind. And so, for Audrey, there was no longer right or wrong. There was family, and there was everything else. Maybe she did know what it meant after all. I squeezed her hand back.

‘Marcelo knows?’ I asked.

‘Only later.’

‘You never told me,’ Katherine said. It was hard to tell if she was offended at being left out or trying to defend herself from an interrogation.

‘I don’t remember much of that morning.’ I kept my attention on Audrey.