Matty didn’t dare speak. Say no to strangers – the slowed-down computer-speak on the video they showed in the gym hall at school two years ago, the girl getting into the man’s car.

‘But I won’t tell if you don’t tell.’ His hand was at the waistband of his swimming trunks, pulling them down a little. The top of his willie was there, crooked against his belly. He looked over, dipped his head down as if asking a gentle question. ‘Hmm?’

Matty ran.

The phone rang. Mamma wasn’t home.

‘Hello?’

It would be the police, and they would know what just happened. They had been looking for a man like that. He had been doing it to other kids. Matty tried to remember everything. He’d had brown hair, a bald patch on the top. A thin chain around his neck with a tiny silver cross on it.

‘I’ve called once already.’ Johanna. ‘Did you hear?’

‘Hear what?’

‘The news. I thought you would have known.’

How did she know already? Maybe the man had already done that to someone else. ‘Known what?’

‘They found the Titanic.’

The photos didn’t come until the next day’s One O’Clock News. Black and white, shadowy. The date and time at the top of the screen. Argo, a deep-sea vehicle, and a robot called Jason had found it. There were more photos of the pointy part of the bow and some boilers, all of which looked the same.

Salvageable. The scientist who had found the wreck said it was like ‘meeting an old friend’.

They showed the ship from 1912, its four tall chimneys, all the people waving. An English survivor, an old lady, saying how her mum wouldn’t go on it and had stayed at home.

Their bodies would have floated, unless they’d been eaten by sharks. Bits of bodies, jagged like the end of a cigarette, floating in dark seawater.

Sometimes you killed someone accidentally, like the people who didn’t put enough lifeboats on the Titanic or the man who steered it into the iceberg in the first place.

Matty leant over and picked up the ashtray. Looked at it.

Sometimes you killed someone on purpose.

Matty had hovered outside the police station for ten minutes, looking very earnestly at the gum spots on the pavement every time someone came out. Reading the adverts for hairspray and perm setters in the hairdresser’s next door. Bold Hold and Aqua Net.

A man that Matty recognised from before, with a dirty rust-coloured blazer and a nailbrush moustache, came jogging down the steps. He sent over a sharp look.

Now or never.

‘I. Um. I want to report a murder.’

The uniformed policeman at reception was young. He had red hair and freckles and was doing a wordsearch in a book. ‘Oh, yeah?’ He didn’t look up. ‘You do it?’

‘No.’