‘Got it. Sure thing, champ.’ He loosened up. Thankfully he didn’t affectionately punch me in the arm, otherwise we would have had to go outside and play catch, and I hadn’t brought my baseball glove. ‘I’ll ask around.’

I didn’t follow him out, choosing to spend a few minutes in the library alone to gather my thoughts. I found myself looking at the medal above the fireplace, thinking about what my mother had said: some people were awarded for killing. The medal was a dark bronze, framed on blue velvet in a glass-faced portrait, with a small rectangular slip of paper, like that inside a fortune cookie, mounted beneath it. The paper had a grid of dots on it, but it wasn’t Morse code or anything I recognised. Beneath all of that was an engraved plaque: Awarded for carrying a life-saving message through heavy fire, 1944. The medal itself was engraved with the words FOR GALLANTRY and WE ALSO SERVE.

Relax. I didn’t just spend eighty words describing a medal because it wasn’t important. I realised my mother was looking at things with a biased eye, but she was right. All killing wasn’t equal; that’s what the medal meant. Audrey was telling me she believed Michael had a good reason for it.

You did this, she’d said. And under her curt words I heard again everything Lucy had told me on the roof: it would have happened a different way. I realised I believed her. I’d sent Michael to prison – what if his anger had metastasised, created something worse? I felt ashamed for my guilt – Michael had deserved to go to jail – but felt it anyway. Knowing that none of this was my fault gave little comfort. It was a sliding doors thing. What had I made him into?

And so, right then, I decided to help him. Not because I thought he was innocent, and not because I thought he was guilty. But because of what everyone had been telling me since we arrived.

You did this.

I was the reason it had happened the way it did. Call it the shame of testifying against blood in the first place, the emotional banishment from my mother or the guilt from my indoctrinated Cunningham loyalty, but my conscience couldn’t handle it anymore. I made up my mind: I’d do the digging. I would either pave my way back into the family with Michael’s absolution, or deliver the final, validating nail in his coffin. Call me a traitor, in league with the coppers, but I also had a feeling one of us was involved. It seemed clear to me: the only way to put my family back together again was to find out which one of them was a killer.

Well, we all are – I’ve already told you that. I just mean most recently.

MY MOTHER

CHAPTER 16