Ross was at the car now, flinging open the door of the Range Rover and climbing in, but Becca prevented him from closing it, her agitation charged now with a new emotion, a searing rage. ‘You got her pregnant, you bastard! Don’t try to deny it!’

Eva’s heart seized with sudden shock.

Ross slammed the door shut, insulating himself from his wife’s frenzied accusations.

Her thoughts tangled in confusion, and that’s when her mother started banging on the window.

‘What are you doing?’ Eva asked, appalled, but Abi didn’t hear, hammering the pane with the heel of her hand.

Down below in the driveway, Mark was wheeling his bike towards the house. Eva saw him and thought that her mother was hammering to get his attention, as if trying to warn him in some way. Mark looked up at them, his expression perplexed. But Abi didn’t see him. She was staring intently at the Campbells’ driveway, her eyes wide with alarm, the hammering becoming furious as she shouted ‘No! No! No!’

Ross was in the car now, the car door shut, the engine starting, Becca with her face to the glass, roaring at her husband to stop.

The child’s blue car was moving now, little legs pedalling. None of the rest of them had seen him. Not Mark staring up at his own house in dazed confusion, not Becca caught in a swarm of furious weeping, not the child’s own father, lost, his vision blurred, too panicked to glance in the rear-view mirror as he put the car in reverse. Only Abi, screaming and banging at the window as if this could stave off catastrophe, as if by her furious actions she could save him, believing until the last second when she stopped, stilled by her own horror.

The car reversed. There was a sickening crunch and then a long silence.

33