‘Why are you calling, Nick?’ he says again.

‘How did you know it was Bethany? Something happened on holiday to make you change your mind. You believed it was Dad’s fault, just like everyone else, but then you saw something. You were going to tell me! What did you see?’

There’s silence, and I wonder if he’s put the phone down. I expect him to hang up on me in disgust, just as my sister did. I get up and walk right to the edge of the river, line my toes up with the end of the harbour wall. I look down into the brackish water; weed gently undulates in the current, writhing as if it’s alive.

He’s breathing more heavily now.

‘It was the pills,’ Luca says eventually.

‘What pills?’

‘Temazepam. She was taking the sleeping pills. I saw them in her room – and she give them to your father because he is awake in the night. Do you remember?’

‘Vaguely. She offered some to me. But what—’

‘On the day that it happen, I work in your mother’s old room. I stood up to take the stretch and I look out the window. I see your father asleep in the sunshine. And then I see your sister. She has the blue pill and she give it to him with a glass of water. He swallow it. A little later she come back with a bottle of red wine and she put it next to him. He is still sleeping. She pour wine into a glass and then she do a strange thing. Two strange things. She throw half the wine from the bottle away – she pour it in the flowers! Then she take a little syringe – you know, the purple one that you have with the medicine for children? She suck some of the wine from the glass into this little device and she put a drop on his shirt. She put a drop on his tongue. I say to myself, “This is strange”, but I don’t think of it again, after what happen to Ruby-May.

‘And then we are on the holiday and it happen again. The night before Ruby-May’s anniversary, I see her give him the blue pill and a glass of water. And he does not drink, even to take a sip of the champagne with Ruby-May’s cake. He tell to me he is on medicine for his heart and he cannot have alcohol. And I think about this all the day, and then I say to myself: if a man cannot drink, but he has a taste for the wine and he is given some, even a little, little drop, that taste will come back, so fierce. When he wake up, he will find the wine and he cannot help himself: he will drink it all.