To be honest, at first, I didn’t think it had taken. Nothing seemed to happen, but I wasn’t going to go and check and have the whole thing blow up in my face. I stayed where I was, masked by the bushes, close to the road, watching and waiting. I remember the moon reflecting in the windows I hadn’t smashed and a bird scaring me as it fluttered out of a tree.

Then everything started to take off, flames shooting up like crazy, smoke billowing out through the broken panes. I’d been told oxygen would fuel the fire and it was happening, because suddenly the whole of one side was ablaze. I watched kind of mesmerized, waiting for the heat to reach me. I don’t think it did, I don’t remember it anyway, I just remember someone shouting and running up the drive and someone else coming after them yelling that they were calling 999. I read later it was a couple of gay neighbors walking their dog.

You might think it weird that I didn’t run. I know I do. But it was like I couldn’t make myself move. I watched the whole thing unfold, more people rushing in, someone grabbing a hose, flames lashing out of the windows curling up to the roof . . . In my head now I’ve lost a sense of time, but I remember sirens wailing up the main road and two fire trucks thundering into the drive. I was still there while the firemen got to work and a crowd gathered on the street, their faces brightened and strobed by emergency lights.

Then a car screeched to a stop behind a fire truck and two people jumped out. I saw who it was right away, recognized the car, but I couldn’t understand it. Why had they come back? What was happening? The girl was screaming, “Nana!” and that was when I realized someone—you—were inside.

I swear I thought the place was empty. I’d watched the three of you go out, ffs, but somehow YOU WERE IN THERE.

Chapter Twenty-Five

Claudia started forward, desperate to get through the smoke and crowd as her mother was carried out of the smoldering front door. She was hauled back; the paramedics needed space, focus, no family emotions.

Noxious clouds swirled around them. Someone shouted that the fire was out. Jasmine clung to her, and Claudia choked on a sob of terror. How badly was her mother injured? Were they going to save her?

Through the mayhem, everything seeming surreal in the strange, smoky light, she caught glimpses of Marcy being lifted on to a spinal board, a respirator and IV tubes already attached . . . She must still be alive.

“I need to go with her,” Claudia cried, as the stretcher was hoisted into the back of a paramedic vehicle to be sped to the helicopter that had just landed at the edge of the moor.