‘A bad man came to my school and said he was going to hurt Mammy and take her away.’

‘Mum?’ Beth said, her lip wobbling again. ‘Is that true?’

I nodded. ‘But, Beth, the police are looking into it all. Look at how many officers are here now. And they’re putting in alarms for us. They’re going to make sure I’m safe – that we’re all safe.’

I saw the doubt in her eyes and it almost broke me. It was my job to make my children’s world safe and this wasn’t even close.

‘Rachel, could we have a chat with you in the kitchen?’ Constable King asked. ‘The girls’ll be fine here with Constable Black, won’t you, girls?’

Both nodded but neither looked convinced.

‘I won’t be long,’ I said to them.

My head now pounding, I walked into the kitchen. The sight of the French doors, one smashed at handle-height, broken glass lying on the tiled floor, made my heart sink.

‘They clearly got scared away,’ Constable King said. ‘But whoever it was left something. You might want to sit down, Rachel. You’re very pale as it is.’

‘What is it?’ I asked, placing one hand on the back of a kitchen chair to steady myself. What other bombshells could possibly be dropped today? ‘Just show me.’

She handed me a photograph, old and faded. Not unlike the ones I’d been looking at in my photo album just the night before. The uniforms we were wearing weren’t the first things I noticed, though, nor the background of the school we’d attended. What was most notable was that there were four of us in the photo, not three. The fourth person, standing on the outside of our group, her smile not as bright as ours, was unmistakably Laura.

One of the faces in the picture, Clare’s, had been scored out. Scored out so deeply that the pen had broken through the photographic paper, leaving a hole where her face should have been. Red biro circled both my face and Julie’s. The words ‘Yr Next’ were scrawled under my name.

Chapter Thirty-Five

Elizabeth

My heart was full by the time the children went home. I could almost forget all the nastiness of the last few days. When I’d been with them, I’d allowed myself to become immersed fully in their worlds. I’d listened to them talk about their schoolwork. Their hopes for the summer. Their badgering of their poor father to get them a dog just like Izzy to play with. They’d invited me into their lives, sharing every little detail with such enthusiasm that I swear I’d felt so much lighter, both physically and emotionally, just for having seen them.