We carry on walking. One foot in front of the other. Dad’s cane. My sandals. We’re nearing the end of the bridge. Sparrows chirp at each other and a mum tells off a child for dropping an ice-lolly stick into the water.

‘Shall we go and get an ice cream, Dad?’ I ask him.

‘Yes, please. I’d like that.’

CHAPTER 42

The unburdened father and daughter buy gelato, we wander around Chelsea and we carry on with our afternoon in the sunshine, cloaking our revealed secrets in chatter about mint chocolate chip versus passionate and the weather, but the more we prattle on, the quieter I know we are inside. The more burdened, after all. Our hearts are still and our minds full, and we are wondering. We are wondering what it cost the other to conceal our secrets for so long, how hard we tried to protect each other, the private pains we suffered for keeping our counsel. Was it a mistake to reveal those secrets now? Have we hurt each other irrevocably with them? A dad knowing his daughter has been abused, and he wasn’t able to see it? A daughter who was shielded by her father in a thirty-four-year-long lie, who had an absent mother living in the same city all along? I am wondering a lot of things right now. But I feel my father and I are both thinking the same thing – that we are beginning to truly know each other again, after all these years, although we are yet to calculate the cost.

Eventually, we get the bus back to Chalk Farm and it expels us on to the pavement, hot and slightly weary. It’s two hours before I’m meeting Salvi at Finsbury Park, half an hour before Kemp arrives to pick Dad up for their trip to the reservoir.

‘Where does she live? Our mother?’ I ask Dad. We’re the other side of the road to the brown double doors. We’re waiting to cross Haverstock Hill to the first island.

There’s a beat. ‘Haringey, I think.’

‘Haringey!’ That’s only about five miles away. I feel an immediate sense of my throat tightening, of claustrophobia almost. ‘Do you know whereabouts?’

‘No.’

I notice a moment’s hesitation in his voice, in the configuration of his facial features; just a tiny one – a chink appearing between two curtains closed against sunlight. ‘Dad?’

‘There have been rumours,’ he says. ‘About where she works.’

‘Rumours? Rumours from where?’

‘Remember that volunteer who used to come round and try to take me out? The one I was sent by the council?’

‘From about five years ago? The one you always sent packing?’

‘Yes. Him. Tom.’