Fiona saw John’s face, as she often did, his considerate expression as he asked her about herself. He listened, too—really listened. No trouble from your life was too small to hold his attention. He’d changed, perhaps, towards the end.

“A strange thing,” Gavin said meditatively, and Fiona wondered briefly if she had him wrong, if it came to him too in moments alone, if he too felt winded by how much he had missed.

She waited, but Gavin didn’t say anything more. Fiona said, to prompt him, “He loved those bairns so much.”

But Gavin only shrugged at this, and she saw she would get nothing else from him.

Their car had broken down, she remembered, hers and Gavin’s, about a year before the murders, and for a week while they were waiting for it to be fixed, John had driven round specially on the days he worked from home to pick Fiona up and take her to the shop so she could still work. She saw John’s kind face again, turning to ask her something from the driver’s seat. That nice car of his.

So much of it was unfathomable, but what Fiona always came back to was the relentless simplicity of this question: how on earth could a man seem so normal, day after day, then suddenly get up from the table one evening, fetch a shotgun and murder his entire family, leaving one child alive only by accident? Fiona was no fool—she could see there were depths to that man that none of them had understood. Nobody could have predicted what would happen, she reminded herself. But it was unsettling for all of them, having Tommy back here. He was the spitting image of his father. Of course it stirred things up.

12

What on God’s earth could prompt a man to get up from the table one evening and murder his family?
Some questions, Tom knew, had no answer, and weren’t really in the end even questions, but rather an exhaustion you carried with you everywhere, so deep it had sunk into your bones. Some mornings when he woke he felt as though his body was full of concrete and he simply could not move. Some days the heaviness was Nicky. Tom used to be glad that his brother so often came about with him, especially in the early years after he left the island, when he had felt so untethered from everything that he thought without the weight of Nicky he might drift up into the sky and vanish without a trace. But Tom was a grown man now and Nicky was still a child: they had less and less in common.

The light coming in through the slats in the wardrobe, slicing the room into segments.

He blinked it away.