I felt her dad’s eyes on my back as we walked off.

If you don’t count the boatbuilding and the light engineering, Brightlingsea is not a noisy town even in the summer. Now, two weeks after the end of the school holidays, it was almost silent, just the occasional car and the sound of the gulls. I stayed quiet until we’d crossed the high street where Leslie pulled her police-issue notebook out of her bag, flipped it open to the last page, and showed it to me.

What have you been up to? was written in black Biro across the page.

“You don’t want to know,” I said.

She made it clear through hand gestures that yeah, she did want to know.

So I told her about the guy that had had his dick bitten off by a woman with teeth in her vagina, which seemed to amuse Leslie, and about the rumors that DCI Seawoll was being investigated by the IPCC about his conduct during the Covent Garden riots, which did not. I also didn’t tell her that Terrence Pottsley, the only other victim to survive the magic that had damaged Leslie’s face, had topped himself as soon as his family’s backs were turned.

We didn’t go straight to the shore. Instead Leslie led me the back way down Oyster Tank Road and through a grassy car park where rows of dinghies were parked on their trailers. A brisk wind from the sea moaned through the rigging and clonked the metal fittings together like cowbells. Hand in hand, we picked our way through the boats and out onto the windswept concrete esplanade. On one side cement steps led down to a beach carved into narrow strips by rotting breakwaters; on the other stood a line of brightly colored huts. Most were closed up tight but I did see one family determined to stretch the summer as far as it would go, the parents drinking tea in the shelter of their doorway while the kids kicked a soccer ball on the beach.