Tom studied his uncle discreetly. Malcolm was wearing an old green apron, which had presumably belonged to Heather, and was stirring the sauce with frowning concentration. There was something incongruous about seeing his uncle dressed like this, brandishing a wooden spoon and making a dish which Tom associated with his mother. It seemed unmanly, though Tom realised what an absurd idea this was.

A feeling of shame came over him suddenly, a plunge of his stomach. And there was something behind it: a memory, he thought. Tom used to try to close down his thoughts in these moments, to prevent them bringing back anything he didn’t want to see, but often that made it more painful in the long run. It was better, he had learned, to be brave and to face up to the memory at once. So, deliberately, masochistically, he followed the threads of the feeling until he found the memory attached to it. The laundry one, as he thought of it. Back again. It was a straightforward event in itself: his mother had asked him to help put away the laundry and he had refused. Then, later, this had led to a row between his parents. It was the timing of the incident that gave it an unsettling significance, and Tom knew this was why it came back to him so regularly: it had taken place just a couple of days before the murders. And although as an adult Tom could see that the two probably weren’t connected, still a sense of horror infused the memory that was far disproportionate to its content.

He turned his eyes away from Malcolm and lived it again. He saw his mother standing by the sink, her hair loose. He was supposed to be going out to meet Angus to play. Tom had never been sure if the scene took place in the morning or afternoon, but he could feel the urgency of the meeting in his body, that tightness of anxiety—not that he was keeping Angus waiting, but something else, something vaguer, perhaps caught up with one of the deeper fears of his childhood—of missing out, of being left behind.

And his mother had said something like, “You’re not going anywhere until you’ve helped me put these clothes away.”

Tommy had believed he was going to do what she told him as he always did. He was surprised when he opened his mouth and said, “No.” Then he felt the frisson in his whole body at having defied her.