She listened, and she didn’t reply. She thought he’d gone mad. There was a time when Alison acted upon every piece of advice that her brother gave her, because he was generally right. But now he was being irrational, he’d see that himself in a day or two, and whatever he said, she was going nowhere for the next twelve months. He could give her the escape fund this time next year, if he wished, or he could spend it on himself. Either way, come September next year, she’d be gone.

Peter went out, just for an hour or so, he said, but he didn’t say where and Alison didn’t ask. Toddy’s probably. She hoped so anyway, she hoped Peter could count on him to help him through the next few weeks and months. She washed up, then fetched the heap of photographs from the living-room mantelpiece, and burned them one at a time, dropping them into a metal bucket where they bucked and curled and shrank to harmless black remnants. Martin had the negatives, of course, but unless he planned to try and sell them to the Sheffield Telegraph there wasn’t much more damage he could do with them.

The kitchen stank of acrid smoke so she went upstairs to her room, and lay down on the bed. She felt better for having eaten, but she was exhausted, bone-weary. She thought about Daniel at the Mayflower Club, opening the gig, warming up the crowd, sharing a bill with Joy Division and the Fall, and she wished she was there, the girl in the band, harmonising with bad boy Steve Levitt. Oh well, she thought, there’d be a next time; she’d make sure of it: she’d make them forgive her.