I stop because the tide of emotion is swelling in me now and I’m not ready for it to unleash itself. So I stare hard at the floor, a black flecked linoleum, striation marks evident from the sweep of a mop. The room smells strongly of disinfectant, like it’s recently been cleaned down. Which makes me wonder what this room has held: people crying, people puking, people pissing themselves. You don’t know how your body will react when subject to this kind of pressure. I myself have become frozen. As if I’m observing myself from a distance. Sitting still like a china doll on this hard plastic chair. One of my daughters, when she was little, used to think dolls came alive as soon as humans left the room. Beth. Always the more imaginative, the more fearful of the two.

‘I would like to see Eva,’ I tell Detective Cassins shakily. ‘My daughter. I should be with her. She shouldn’t be alone.’

She nods, keeping her eyes on me. ‘Of course. We will arrange it. But for now, I need to ask you some questions, Abi.’

She asks me what time we arrived at the school. What was the plan? Did Beth know we were coming? Did Corinne? I tell her about the phone call from Mark, about what he’d discovered in the house, and how I had flung open the car door and begun to run. When she leads me through to the moment of impact, the moment I witnessed their fall, I have to hold on to the edge of my seat with both hands, as if the force of memory might carry me away.

After a while, the door opens and a uniformed officer enters with a bag. Cassins nods to her, then says to me:

‘Perhaps you’d like to change out of that blouse, Abi.’

I look down, shocked all over again by the blood. I had forgotten it was there.