“So I’ve been told.” He glanced back over his shoulder, toward his house, then started forward. I wanted, wildly and irrationally, the seatbelt.

“The note?” I prompted.

“What about it?”

“You said you’d tell me.”

“I said I’d tell you what I know. Which is nothing.”

I clenched my hands, feeling fifteen—no, twelve again. “You tricked me!”

“Used to be harder. When did it arrive?”

My nails had dug crescents in my palm. I smoothed them over my skirt. “Yesterday.”

“Trish arrived yesterday. Not her writing?”

“How would I know?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

“What about the writing on your fence? The same?”

“Most people write rather differently with brushes than they do with pens, Mr Damson,” I said primly.

“Could be anyone,” he mused as we passed the showgrounds. Too fast. I wasn’t used to being in a truck, or to speed: perhaps I had succeeded in growing up, after all. “Nobody much likes you Scotts.”

“We’re hardly Spicers.”

He shrugged. “Nearly everyone’s married into the Spicers at some point. I wouldn’t put too much store by that. Otherwise—what about old mate at the truck stop yesterday? The crazy one, with the dog in the passenger seat? If it was a dog. Something hairy.”

It might have been a man, slumped low.

I shivered. “How would he know—”

“Know what?”

“To call me Tink,” I said. Gary didn’t answer. It was a foolish hope. “And why would a stranger hate us?”

“Ask your mother,” said Gary. “Any point in asking who she thinks did it?”

I opened my mouth, closed it again. Of course I should. She would take the whole question away, tell me not to fret. But the question was mine. “I didn’t want to trouble her,” I said. “Mr Sage said—”

“About that,” said Gary, and pulled over to the side of the road. He turned to face me. Anyone could see us. They’d tell my mother and she would know that, hard as I tried, there was still rot at the core.

“Please keep driving,” I said.

“Trish said you never wrote.”

“To her?”

“What did she do? What did I do? And don’t say you know, because I don’t. Look, Tina, it’s been three years. I’ve got to get back before my mum gets mad, let alone yours. She’s not pleased with Mrs Scott, let me tell you. Calling the police.”

“I really ought to be getting home,” I said, with awful politeness.

“You can walk, or you can answer my question: What happened the night your dad disappeared?”