‘I don’t know, Josh!’ Mum is shouting too now. A long blare from a car horn sounds behind us as we speed through a red light. ‘I don’t fucking know, OK? I don’t have an answer. Any answers. And don’t think that I’m not fucking angry too!’

And as quickly as it came, the anger goes again. It’s as if someone opened the window and sucked all the rage out into the growing twilight.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say again.

‘Me too, love. Me too. And I’m sorry to you, Dana.’

‘What for?’

‘For having nothing suitable for you in my wardrobe. I’ve not been shopping in years. Maybe we could go together one day.’ She offers us both a watery smile as we pull into the driveway. ‘Maybe if I can’t get to know my son, I can get to know his girlfriend.’

I’m about to protest again about the ‘girlfriend’ label before Dana has to, but I’m interrupted.

‘Thanks, Mrs Milton, I’d like that very much.’

‘And I keep telling you he’s got a name you know, Mr Walters. Could you please just call him Martin from now on?’

And my stomach hits the floor.

*

His first name’s Peter. PMW are the initials on the timetable. But he’s known by his middle name. Martin. It takes Mum more than a little convincing from both me and Dana to turn the car around and head back to the police station.

While we’re on the way, everything settles in my head. It all starts to make sense. All those comments about my dad after I’d asked him to stop. Him reading the newspaper while I was in the room. What was it Ahmed had said? A pretty good lever to pull. He’d been pulling on it subtly since I’d first gone back to school.

And that first Thursday session, the conversation we’d had – they’d had – in front of me. How it had all sounded so natural at the time. But it had been planned. Of course it had. And it explained why Alan and Vince treated him differently from any other teacher.

And the fact that he’d been in my house, had sat at our table. My skin won’t stop crawling. We’re stuck in traffic – shoppers coming home – and I keep re-seeing Mum touching him on the arm. Where else had she touched him? I can’t think about it.

‘Did you know?’ I ask Dana outside the station as we wait for Mum to park the car.

‘No idea. But it makes sense, doesn’t it? Alan and Vince—’

‘Alan and Vince? They know. Definitely. The way they are with him.’

I think about it. The language they use, the way Carl commanded that room at the Crown. ‘Yeah, you’re right.’