He put a hand in my hair, just above my ear. There was a tiny squeak as his lips rubbed together just once. It must have been a minute before he answered. ‘Depends which one you mean.’

I’d not even thought of that. I had just assumed that he had been in the same place the whole time. ‘How many were you at?’ I tried not to sound too probing. To let him know that he didn’t have to answer, if he didn’t want to.

‘Five.’

Five. Was that better or worse? No one likes moving house. It probably hadn’t been like moving house.

His nail softly scratched my skull, right at the top of my spine. ‘Maximum security. For two years. With the worst sort. On your own most of the time. High security. For a long time. Medium. Then open, for the last two. Where you can go out a bit.’

He didn’t sound angry, or anguished. Just – that’s what it was. Fifteen years of his life, told in ten seconds.

I touched the inside of his wrist. Thick, glazed cuts crossed over his older forestry scar. They would always be there, now. He stayed very still.

‘What do you think happened?’ I asked.

Jim knew what I meant. The breath he took in was as big as the whole house, bigger, taking in air from the far hills. ‘My mother.’

The words grew wings, stretched out, flew. I opened my eyes wide at him and took my fingers away from his arm.

His gaze was a hill tarn on a dark day. ‘She didn’t like her. She had ways. I still can’t tell you how.’

He didn’t say, ‘But I know it’s crazy.’ I didn’t say, ‘That is not possible.’

He told me more about his time inside, after I’d teased him about how quiet he was in bed. He’d said that you had to keep it pretty under wraps in prison, and I’d wanted to die for being so thoughtless.

He spoke, patiently, of the endless boredom. The routine he had to keep, meetings with psychologists, workshops he hated. Of trying to keep fit, once he was allowed to move about more. Doing his best to avoid all of the politics, the cliques. Crap meals on plastic trays. A massive chunk of his life that was not a video but a sketch with a soft HB pencil, page after page of the same thing.

And no trees. No hills.

‘What does your ma say about you coming up here?’ he said in the morning.

I screwed up my face and tried to look exceptionally cute and wholesome.

‘Does she not know?’

I bit my lip and shook my head in slow motion.

His frown was faintly headmastery. ‘Does anyone know you’re up here?’

‘A friend. My next-door neighbour in halls.’

Flora. Really, really posh – she had freaking rowing medals and played the bassoon. She listened to my story while eating toffee popcorn, like she was watching a movie heavy on the swanky visual effects, and she didn’t tell me I was mad. In fact, the next day, she’d presented me with a book on transmogrification and taken me to see this clairvoyant woman who’d put her fingers on my temples and told me that I’d be a great traveller and that my many sisters missed me.