Nobody in the family ever spoke of it. Not one word. He only found out from the police that Ruth had tried to tell their mother. Ruth was eleven at that point, and already in trouble at school. He remembered she ran away from home once and got brought back by the police – their mum went crazy about what the neighbours would think when they saw a panda car parked outside the house. It wasn’t really a coherent attempt at flight; she’d headed off with a backpack containing a change of clothes, a fluffy penguin and a Sony Walkman it turned out she’d lifted from a classmate. Back in those days, if you ran away, you got in trouble for it but nobody really asked you why you’d done it. The weekend visits continued until she was thirteen, when she just refused to go. Andrew stopped going not long after.

Ruth never spoke to her father again. When their mother died of bowel cancer, the twins were twenty-six years old. Ruth showed up at the church stick-thin and wraithlike and everyone said what a shame it was she had gone off the rails – she sat at the back, away from everyone else, and left straight after the service, because their father was there. Andrew stayed in contact with his dad after their mother died, took him out for a pint on his birthday, called him once in a while, with both of them pretending that nothing had ever happened – and that would have continued until Thomas Warren had died as an old man if Ruth had not gone to the police.

It was their mother dying that had been the catalyst. It was that put Ruth into therapy, although she was in it on and off for five years before she found the courage to make the complaint. Poor Mrs Warren had failed to protect her children when she was alive but in dying, she had given her daughter the courage to confront what had happened.

Andrew managed his life much better, on the outside, but at a cost – the years of silence that had built up gradually like walls around him and had kept him safe and helped him build his own quiet life, it had all been torn down when the police knocked at his door without warning.

‘After they left that day,’ he says, hesitantly, to Isobel, then stops.

She leaves a long silence, then prompts him. ‘Yes …’

‘After they left …’ He stops again and stays stopped. Whatever he did when the police officers had gone – cried and curled up into a ball, went for a run, screamed abuse at the ceiling – whatever it was, he cannot articulate it. He cannot bring himself to go back to that moment.