He had to make some kind of plan, he thought. He needed to come up with an idea of where to go next, what he might do. But he was tired. He was afraid there was no next.

There were still traces of shaving foam and tiny dark hairs in the sink from that morning. Tom ran the tap to splash them away. The water drained slowly, so he took the grille out, wiping the black slime off the edge with his finger and tapping it into the darkness of the plughole. Then he bent forward to peer after it. The grime round the edges of the plughole faded almost immediately into black; impossible to tell how deep it went. Tom was distracted for a moment by the idea of the void tunnelling on and on, sliding deeper into black; he imagined being small enough to vanish down it. He turned the tap on harder to see if he could make the water catch up with itself and rise to the surface. It was almost disappointing when he managed it, a faint sheen a long way below, beginning as a glimmer then gradually thickening, ascending, surging over the edges and turning clear and harmless within the safety of the sink.

He rinsed his hands again, and as he turned off the taps the missing piece of his memory came back, sidling quietly to the front of his mind. Where was Nicky? Nicky was in bed that day, reading his comics. Nicky’s shoulder was still sore; it was right after he had fallen between the rocks on the beach and he and Tommy had had to walk half the way home. Nicky had to rest for a couple of days, wasn’t allowed out to play, and wouldn’t be expected to help with any household tasks.

Tom experienced a strange sense of the pieces of the world realigning themselves around him. There was some satisfaction in having solved this puzzle, but mostly he felt thrown off balance. As he went back along the corridor to his room, something else occurred to him. Nicky dislocated his shoulder when he was about eight years old. Tom himself must have been six. This realization took the breath from Tom’s lungs: the incident could not have taken place right before the murders.

Was it possible? Tom lay back down on his bed and tried to think. He was almost certain that he wasn’t mistaken about Nicky’s shoulder still healing that day. That part, as soon as it came to him, felt true: not that his mind had invented it now, but that it had always been there, just out of sight. But who knew what the truth was? It was not as though he had anybody to ask.