Blood tells, my father’s voice said flatly against my ear; and then, with a razor edge of amusement, So you think you’re a better da. Here I had been milking every self-righteous drop out of how Olivia and Jackie had screwed up; nothing either of them could have done differently, not at any lost moment along the way, would have saved us from this. This was all mine. I could have howled at the moon like a werewolf and bitten out my own wrists to get this out of my veins.

Shay said, “Don’t be saying that. She’s gone; forget her. Leave her rest in peace, and go on with your maths.”

The soft whisper of the pencil on paper. “Forty-two?”

“No. Go back to the start; you’re not concentrating.”

Holly said, “Uncle Shay?”

“Mmm?”

“This one time? When I was here and your phone rang and you went in the bedroom?”

I could hear her gearing up towards something big. So could Shay: the first beginnings of a wary edge were growing in his voice. “Yeah?”

“I broke my pencil and I couldn’t find my sharpener because Chloe took it in Art. I waited for ages, but you were on the phone.”

Shay said, very gently, “So what did you do?”

“I went and looked for another pencil. In that chest of drawers.”

A long silence, just a woman gabbling hysterically from the telly downstairs, muffled under all those thick walls and heavy carpets and high ceilings. Shay said, “And you found something.”

Holly said, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry.”

I almost went straight through that door without bothering to open it. Two things kept me outside. The first one was that Holly was nine years old. She believed in fairies, she wasn’t sure about Santa; a few months back, she had told me that when she was little a flying horse used to take her for rides out her bedroom window. If her evidence was ever going to be a solid weapon—if, someday, I wanted someone else to believe her—I had to be able to back it up. I needed to hear it come out of Shay’s mouth.

The second thing was that there was no point, not now, in bursting in there with all guns blazing to save my little girl from the big bad man. I stared at the bright crack of light around the door and listened, like I was a million miles away or a million years too late. I knew exactly what Olivia would think, what any sane human being would think, and I stood still and left Holly to do my dirtiest work for me. I’ve done plenty of dodgy things in my time and none of them kept me awake at night, but that one is special. If there’s a hell, that moment in the dark hallway is what will take me there.