Fran’s mouth drops open. ‘Oh my God,’ she says. ‘That’s right. The night I babysat, the weekend before she went missing, I thought I heard noises.’

‘Oh?’

‘I went up to check, and Lily was awake and I remember now, she wanted to play Hide and Seek.’ She closes her eyes, as though trying to conjure up the memory. ‘I remember telling Zara afterwards. Lily kept pointing at something. Good God. So you’re saying Gavin was there – hiding? While I was checking what the noise was?’

The thought turns my stomach. As a child, I was always afraid to get out of bed after dark, in case a hand shot out from under my bed and grabbed my ankle. As an adult, I thought I knew better – that this was the stuff of horror films, not real life. But if a teenage boy can so easily take a spare key from a neighbour and let himself in to creep around, then anything is possible.

‘I guess that’s what happened. He broke in, got caught by Lily, threatened her that morning in the building site, then locked her in the room by pushing barrels in front of the door. That’s what Aoife told Ellen, but only recently. She saw him pushing the barrels, though she didn’t know why. Jesus. The thoughts of that little girl locked inside and nobody realizing.’ I clear my throat. ‘You say you saw the room with the barrels – so you were there, searching that day?’

‘All day, yes. We all were.’

We all were. Including the parasite babysitter? ‘Who exactly was there?’

‘My mam, Mary and Robbie obviously, the Hogans.’ She pauses, as though daring me to bring up Zara and Robbie again. I don’t. ‘Your in-laws, all the kids from around the area too. Cora was there, crying a lot, because people kept asking her where she’d last seen Lily, and muttering about why she’d left her alone. She was really upset, and she didn’t even have her parents with her, now that I think about it.’

‘She was out helping with the search on her own?’

‘Her mother had gone to Spain for a funeral, and her dad was at work at least until evening time, I suppose, so she was with her babysitter.’

Cynthia. Of course.

36

June 2018

ON MONDAY MORNING, I linger at the school gate pretending to look at my phone, watching out for Liz Landry. My mind is in overdrive, whirring with everything I discovered yesterday. No matter how I look at it, regardless of what Gavin Bowman did, there’s no getting away from it: Cynthia was there that morning. My mother was in Rowanbrook when Lily disappeared. And sometime around then, she introduced me to a new sister. But why? Why would she want another child when she couldn’t look after the one she had? There had to be a reason.

Liz emerges through the school gate. She greets me with a half-smile, and we fall into step.