Mary takes her nurse fob watch from her pocket – a present from David on one of his rare jaunts back home. An obscure-looking Virgin Mary with oversized arms ticks around the clock, hung on a thick, gold link chain. Well, it was gold once, now it’s more silver, the shine, like everything else to do with David, rubbed away by the sweat and grime of real life. Quarter to twelve.

‘Mary?’ Malachi waves his arms to get her attention. ‘Hand me these keys then. I need to get back home.’

Mary nods as she looks in the junk drawer, rifling through papers, wires and replacement batteries for the smoke alarm until she finds the spare keys. Tristan had once attached a plastic marijuana leaf to them thinking it was funny. Mary had given him a lecture about the dangers of drugs but never bothered to remove the key ring.

She fusses with the catch on the watch as she pins it to her uniform, swearing to get it fixed. ‘You want some tea before you go?’ she asks Malachi.

He spins the keys around a long finger. ‘No, thanks. Too hot.’

‘You call this hot? It’s thirty-five degrees in Manila today.’ She lifts the kettle and gives it a shake before she flicks the switch.

‘Right,’ Malachi says. ‘I better get back to my books.’

He sulks off and she rolls her eyes at his constant grumpiness. But as she hears the front door close she stops cold. The twitch becomes a scratch. Something is wrong, for her feelings never are. Today, something horrible will happen.

Chapter Three

Pamela

There is not a stitch of breeze on the roof of Nightingale Point. Today, up here is just as suffocating as being in the flat with Dad. Pamela places her new running shoes on the ground and holds onto the metal railing; her long rope of blonde hair falls forward and dangles over the edge. The sunrays hit the nape of her neck and she feels her skin, so dangerously pale and thin, begin to burn. She shifts her body into the shade of the vast grey water tanks and imagines the water as it rolls between them and into the maze of pipes around the block’s fifty-six flats. Pamela loves the roof. Since she returned to London a few days ago it’s become the only space Dad does not watch over her. Sometimes she wishes she was back in Portishead with her mum, just for the freedom from his eyes. But in a way being there was worse, because it meant Malachi was over a hundred miles away rather than two floors. At least here there is a chance she will see him, run into him in the lift, or bump into him in the stairwell.