The police car smells of synthetic-apple air fresheners and sweat. She is in the back. It’s overheated, the fabric of the seats soft and yielding, old foam that feels like it might never let her get out. It reminds her of car journeys taken with her family when she was younger and would almost always be sick. Frannie insisted on eating pick ’n’ mix in the back, even though the smell made Cathy worse. Joe always got the front seat. He was the eldest, he said, and those were the rules. Cathy leans her head against the window and closes her eyes to everything.

At the police station, Cathy is taken to an interview room. The calm that descended in her living room has stayed with her. She wonders if a jury might be lenient. Who will represent her. What their parents will think.

A police officer confirms in a monotone that Evan is dead.

Cathy stares at the wall for a while, waiting, with the artificial awake-ness that shift workers and people in crises carry with them. Two late-night phone calls in one single summer. Two bodies. Two sleepless nights. If they were here, in different circumstances, she’d make the joke they have about their father. ‘Joseph, Catherine, Francesca, whoever you are!’ She wouldn’t even have to finish it before they’d laugh. Her siblings, the people they once were.

‘The wait is because we’re assigning you a duty solicitor,’ a different police officer says to Cathy at eleven o’clock.

Cathy’s eyes are gritty and she rubs at them. Make-up comes away and she wonders what she must look like. A criminal? She thinks of the animals at the practice and hopes somebody is looking after them. She wonders where Joe and Frannie are. If her parents have been informed. What Tom’s doing. She is sequestered from it, here, from the information and the questions. A small self-contained room away from it all.

She stares at the wall before answering. It’s painted white, in cheap paint that’s bubbled like there’s grit underneath it.

Suddenly, here in the white room, she understands why she’s calm. The worst has happened. There is now a way out, even though she has had to detonate a bomb to expose the exit route from her family. She takes a breath. It’s over. The guilt and the panic and the waiting are over.

‘I have a criminal lawyer’s details in my phone,’ she says. ‘Can I call him? He’s called Jason.’

Cathy meets Jason in a meeting room an hour later. He has mismatched socks on, that’s the first thing she notices. He is somehow shabby-looking, but she can’t say why she thinks a lawyer shouldn’t have a partially grey shaggy beard, or not be carrying a take-out Costa coffee that’s dribbled down the side.

‘I’m Jason,’ he says to her, and sits opposite her, crossing his legs at the thigh.

‘You’re probably wondering how I got your details,’ she says.

‘Not really,’ he says with a quick smile. ‘Don’t worry. Right. Let’s start from the beginning.’ He sips at his coffee. It is sweet-smelling, some sort of syrup in it.