His hand was gripping the mantle, clawing flecks of paint from it, as his eyes darted between us. There were too many of us between him and the door to escape, and there was a liberally iced window behind him. He could possibly go through that, depending on the softness of the snow below, but I felt confident one of us could grab him if he tried.

‘I . . .’ he hesitated. ‘I waited so long to meet you. I thought it would be different.’ He had the same wistful tone he’d used when letting me in to see Michael in the Drying Room. You really care about him, don’t you? . . . I didn’t really have brothers growing up. ‘I was always different when I was young. I never fit in. Got into fights. And then Mu—’ He cut himself off and I could see anger in the flare of his nostrils. ‘I thought Alan was a liar at first. I’d always called them my parents. I asked them, and they just . . .’ I could tell he was struggling with the memory. ‘They just admitted it. And these people, who I’d thought my whole life were my family, they looked so happy about it. They couldn’t tell me who I was. I’d had foster brothers and sisters, but the Williamses always told me I was theirs. They said they didn’t know anything more, that they’d taken me in without a name, when I was seven years old.’

‘Seven?’ Audrey gasped. ‘No wonder no one knew who you were. What happened to you in those two years?’

‘I don’t . . . remember.’ Jeremy looked like he was fishing for something that wasn’t there. Too young, too beaten, too abused, perhaps; those memories all repressed. The Sabres had been so scared Audrey would bleed their secrets that they’d told her they’d killed her son to be sure she wouldn’t double-cross them, but then they hadn’t had the gumption to do it themselves; they’d simply left him on the street to die. How long they kept him and how long he lived on his own is something I’ll never know. But how that experience might transform a young mind – well, I didn’t have to look far to understand. DNA testing wasn’t widely used thirty-plus years ago, and neither were missing persons reports spread across the infant internet. Hair analysis could match family lineage, but it never held up in court – just ask the Queensland detective who’d driven across state lines to accuse a Cunningham. Got into fights. Across state lines, Jeremy was a nameless child in a city he didn’t know.