He’s very polite. He would have made them a coffee, and I’m guessing that as they had a difficult subject to raise, they would have accepted it, maybe even made a remark or two about what a nice house it was, asked him how long he’d lived there, clocked the pictures of him and Ruth on the fridge, along with the tidiness and absence of personality. I wonder whether they would have been in uniform or whether they send detectives for that sort of thing – the latter, I’m guessing, a man and a woman, probably, gentle of manner, trained in how to broach such a matter with sensitivity. They would have asked him some general questions about his childhood first and he would have told them what he has always told himself, that it was basically happy, despite his parents’ divorce, that his life has always been pretty ordinary.

Only then, after they had asked him a few general questions, would they have enquired when he had last spoken to his sister, Ruth. Only then would they have said, ‘We’re here because an allegation has been made …’

Poor Andrew, caught unawares, trapped by his lifetime habit of denial: he’d just told them his childhood was perfectly happy. Don’t I, as much as anybody else, understand how you can ignore the truth and carry on ignoring it even when it stands before you as large and obvious as a woolly mammoth? Sometimes the price of acknowledging it is just too painfully high.

I wonder what he said to the officers. Perhaps he was uncharacteristically brusque, in his shock. Perhaps he said, ‘Look, sorry, but I’ve no idea what you’re talking about.’

*

‘It must have been deeply shocking for you …’ Isobel prompts, raising and lifting her head in very small movements, as regular as a metronome. She reminds me a little of one of those nodding dogs you used to get on the back seats of cars, the ones they put in TV series along with men in flared trousers and leather jackets to tell you it’s the sixties or seventies.

‘Do you feel able to tell me a bit more about your childhood from your point of view …’ If I were Andrew, the gentleness in her voice at this point would make me want to punch her but, without going into any detail, keeping it factual and practical, he does his best.

*

Andrew and Ruth Warren are twins, thirty-two years of age. Their father, Thomas Warren, only started abusing Andrew after the divorce, when they would come for weekend custody visits. The first occasion was when Ruth had stayed at home with their mother because she was sick – or claiming to be sick, who knows. Andrew says he wouldn’t blame her for coming up with excuses but of course that meant that it was just him who went, with no idea what was coming.