‘Somewhere we won’t get bothered.’

Shit, he was taking her there. A nervous flutter filled her stomach. He seemed angry. Was it wise to follow him? She fumbled in her handbag as she walked, closing her fingers around her mobile phone. Regardless of the uneasy feeling she had, she continued to follow him along the street, taking the turning into the cul-de-sac leading to Billy Cawley’s bungalow.

‘I don’t think we need to go there, though,’ Anna said.

It was pointless putting up an argument now; they were directly outside the bungalow. It was even more eerie in the dark, the only illumination coming from the streetlight halfway down the road and the weak lighting shining from the windows of the bungalow next door to it.

‘You were very keen on spending your time here as a kid.’

‘Kids haven’t learned to be afraid,’ she said simply.

‘Really? I heard enough squealing and saw enough kids running away that said different.’

‘It’s not the same kind of fear, though, is it? Not the kind that comes from experience, from learning the hard way that people can be vicious and cruel. Evil.’

‘Kids can be all of those things too, though, remember.’

‘Oh, I didn’t say they couldn’t be, just that as kids the fears aren’t entrenched, and kids don’t think about the consequences; they don’t weigh up all the possible outcomes of an action like adults do. Or most adults, anyway.’

‘Sounds like you’re speaking from experience now.’ He tilted his chin, then looked her straight in the eye. ‘What do you remember about that day, Bella?’ he asked softly.

‘It’s Anna,’ she said wearily. ‘The day she was taken you mean? Not an awful lot, weirdly. You’d think it’d be engraved in my mind, wouldn’t you? The thing is, I’m not sure I can separate what I actually remember from then, with what I remember after the fact, or years later. Snippets of other people’s memories, of newspaper articles, news stories – they’re all jumbled up in my head. Whose memory is whose?’

‘That’s what I thought.’

Anna narrowed her eyes. ‘Meaning?’

‘Meaning I don’t think you can accurately remember something that happened when you were ten – however traumatic that event was. And in fact, I’d go as far as to hypothesise that it was because it was traumatic that you can’t remember it well.’

‘Okay, so I don’t recall the events very well now, but at the time – when I was ten and my friend was taken – I would’ve been able to tell you exactly what happened. Accurately. It’s only now, years later, that things have become jumbled.’

‘Maybe.’ Pat shrugged. ‘Maybe not. Anyway, what did you want to ask me?’

Anna pushed down her rising sense of annoyance. Who was he to say what she could remember or not and why? Now wasn’t the time to get into a debate about memory, though.

‘I wanted your version of what happened the day Jonie went missing.’