Silently, I shake my head. The movement gives me vertigo. I don’t know what she is trying to show me.

‘When we were kids,’ she goes on, ‘this was Sarah Jane’s favourite toy. A zoetrope. This isn’t the one we had back then. That one got … damaged. But I bought this one. To remind myself. To remember.’

She pushes a finger against the panels, setting them revolving. She keeps pushing so that the panels spin faster and faster. For a moment, there’s nothing but mess and blur, nothing coalescing, nothing making sense; but then I see it. The tiny figures flow together and become one: not a series of images but a single dancing figure, swaying, gliding, animated.

‘I told Sarah Jane … she could imagine anything she wanted. She only had to think of it, and we could make it real. I thought that was how you were supposed to do things, how you made the world okay. My parents – my father especially – controlled everything that way.’

Beside us, the zoetrope slows, the dancing figure fragmenting, splitting. Falling apart. But Freya sets it spinning again and the little figure dances back to life.

‘I thought it didn’t matter what was real and what I made up. It was only later that I learned how dangerous that could be. I was lucky enough to have someone set me straight. A psychologist, would you believe.’ She gives a wry smile. ‘But it was different with Jane – with Sarah – because she never really had anyone to help her. And because she had such a lot of reality to suppress. With her, the game got completely out of hand.’

I can’t tear my eyes away from the zoetrope, and its spinning feels as if it is spinning everything inside my head, so fast, so violently that I can’t get a grasp.

‘She was there when it happened,’ says Freya. ‘Sarah Jane witnessed the whole thing. Her father … the hammer … She had nightmares about it; she couldn’t get those images out of her mind.’

And then Freya tells me about the night with her cousin, up on the roof.

‘Back then,’ she goes on, ‘I was only trying to help her. And later, after the accident, I honestly thought she would stop. But years later, when my own parents died, she came to their funeral. I was crying and she put her arms round me and hugged me. I knew very little about what had happened to her since we were children. I knew she grew up with various foster families. But she came to the funeral, and put her arms around me and hugged me, and she whispered to me: It’s all right, Freya, remember? It’s all right. You can just Make-Believe that they’re not really gone.