Fran’s car is in her driveway when I get back from the school, the photo of Lily still burning a hole in my pocket. If anyone can help me work out which house is in the picture, Fran can. But I don’t want to leave the kids on their own, so I sit on my hands, figuratively, and at one point – during a particularly fraught piece of Irish reading homework – literally, until Mark gets home from work, then I run next door and ring Fran’s bell.

She looks irritated. I’ve upset her, I suspect, though I’m not sure how. But when I show her the photos, curiosity takes over and she invites me through to her back garden.

Five minutes later, over cups of tarry coffee on the sunny patio, I tell her the story of the tin in the coal bunker, and my theory that this means Lily was alive after the day she went missing.

I spread the photos across the small, wrought-iron table, turning them to face Fran.

‘I was hoping you might know whose house it is. It’s the inverse of our house; like yours actually – with the back door on the opposite side. It’s so similar, I think it has to be a Rowanbrook house.’

Fran peers at them.

‘Any ideas?’

She picks up the one showing the back of the house and Lily’s face. Pulling her glasses down from the top of her head, her eyes scan the photo, over and back, over and back. Giving nothing away.

Eventually she looks up, a curious expression on her face. ‘Yes. In fact … Yes. I know whose house it is.’

49

June 2018

I SIT FORWARD. ‘ARE you serious? You think you know?’

Fran points at the photo, at the top corner of the back of the house.

‘Do you see that?’

I lean closer.

‘The window?’

‘Yes. Look at the upper part of the window, the small panel that opens out.’

I’m squinting now. ‘It’s hard to see …’

‘Look below it then, at the rest of the window.’

‘I can’t really make anything out – there’s a glare on the glass from the sun, I guess.’

‘Exactly. There’s no glare at the top. No glass. The top part is broken, covered over with cardboard.’

‘OK, you’re going to have to spell this out for me.’

She points at the photo, stabbing at the picture of the house and the tiny broken window. ‘Ruth Cavanagh was always complaining about having her windows broken. To be honest, she was such a wagon, I think some of the local kids targeted her house deliberately. So unless I’m way off, that’s Ruth Cavanagh’s house.’

This is not what I was expecting.

‘The lady who wouldn’t cut down her trees – your friend Zara’s aunt? But why would she steal a child?’

Fran shrugs and raises her hands.

‘That’s the million-dollar question.’

‘Hmm. It doesn’t really add up. We know Gavin locked Lily in that room, and we know that the O’Briens were questioned by police, and we know that’ – I hesitate, then push on – ‘that Eddie Hogan had an argument with Robbie Murphy. But Ruth Cavanagh? It makes no sense.’