‘He was supposed to be like me. You’re supposed to be like me! I tried to reason with him. I knew he’d tell you the first chance he got. And he knew – he had those photos Alan tried to sell me first and he knew who hurt me, hurt us, when I was a child and he refused to tell me. He said I’d just kill them, that he’d learned it wasn’t the way forward, and I realised he wasn’t like me at all. He made me feel alone, just like my fake parents did. Sometimes . . . I can’t breathe when people . . .’ He was pulling at his collar again. ‘The things he was saying. I couldn’t breathe . . . And then the woman . . .’

‘Lucy.’ I was surprised, and a little impressed, to hear Audrey correcting him.

‘I tried to figure out how to leave, but how could I when you were all refusing to go and I’m stuck playing the role of the police officer? And she figured it out. She’d been waiting for me, and I hadn’t shown up. Once she knew the first body was a cop, I was revealed. I begged her to keep quiet. I gave her a choice, you understand? She chose to jump.’ His voice had turned pitiful, begging. He really had believed we would be all like him, and he was shocked that we weren’t.

‘Why?’ That was Katherine, disgust on her tongue summing up the feeling of the room, ‘Why would anyone think our family was a place to fit in?’

‘Michael had no right!’ Jeremy was shouting now. ‘He had no right to tell me where I belonged. To tell me that what I’d done was wrong. The hypocrite!’ He spat the next words. ‘Look at yourselves. Cunninghams. You’re all killers, aren’t you?’

We all looked at each other. Andy went to raise his hand, presumably to suggest that he hadn’t killed anyone, but thought better of it.

I pictured Jeremy, sitting against the wall of Alison Humphrey’s thick-aired apartment, toilet door closed, looking at his trembling, ashen hands, having just learned about his real family. We were easy to research online. Everyone knew what type of family we were. Michael, Robert, Katherine – and later Sofia – theirs were all public incidents, after which they were reported as having blood on their hands. We were infamous, in the media and police circles. Jeremy had found us, steadied his hands and thought, I’m not so different after all.

There was a flurry of footsteps behind us. We turned to see Gavin, who looked surprised to see everyone so agitated. ‘Bags are ready,’ he said. Then did a double take. ‘Who died?’