How could Higham ever admit that, actually, one child of his had attempted to murder another? One child of his, high on the drug PCP – or angel dust – had tried to coerce a ‘friend’ – the bullet-headed Brian – into raping another child, his own half-brother, in front of an audience. One child of his had encouraged his once-girlfriend to use so much heroin and Xanax that she had overdosed and died, gurgling at our feet.

And so all this time, James believed that he had effectively murdered his best friend after they had tussled with the knives. Dalziel had been removed in an ambulance, bleeding, taken to a private hospital after the horrible scuffle whilst I still lay unconscious. I’d been hospitalised myself; James had been briefly arrested along with Brian whilst the police tried to ascertain what had happened.

Enquiries I’d made later to the family about Dalziel had been politely rebuffed. They were mourning their dear son; they didn’t want strangers’ eyes on them, and I accepted that. Brian had disappeared into the navy, I found out later. James and I returned to our lives, separated – scathed and saddened but ultimately the apparent survivors. We had been utterly brazen in our ambition to show no one could restrain us – and our ambition had exploded in our faces.

All these years, James had endured the pain of thinking he’d murdered his friend; that his fatal blow had killed Dalziel. We’d believed that Higham had covered up the death to prevent a scandal; that James had been saved by the lies of the father for the death of the son.

But Higham had been covering up something very different indeed.

I sat beside him, staring, staring, and I was eighteen again, back in Oxford. My hands were shaking. I kept looking up at him to check that I hadn’t gone mad.

‘Where have you been?’ I said, and he smiled slightly, and I saw a glimpse of the old Dalziel, the boy I had once known. Although now I looked closer, I could see that his beauty was quite ravaged.

‘Here and there, darling, here and there. South America, mainly.’

‘But how can you have just disappeared like that? You can’t have just vanished off the face of the earth.’

‘I can.’ He put his hand in his pocket. ‘Although obviously I didn’t.’

‘Well, where—’

‘There are plenty of places to hide, Rose, if you don’t want to be found.’

‘So your father … ‘ I said slowly.

‘Has forgiven me? Just about.’ Dalziel tried to smile, his teeth bared briefly. They told the tale of past addiction and indulgence; no longer perfect and straight and white. ‘As long as I do what my father says, I’ll be all right.’