If it hadn’t been for him, none of this would have happened. Mama would have left university and got a good job. She’d have married my dad. I’d have grown up in a normal family. Maybe we would have lived in the mountains like she’d always said he did and I’d have had an idyllic, rural childhood instead of being shunted around from foster home to foster home. Or we might have lived in a big house with a garden in somewhere like Surrey where he would have a job in a bank and Mama would have a home-based job making jewellery or something which meant she had lots of time for me too. We would do things like bake cakes together and steal each other’s make-up. We’d go on holidays somewhere sunny and stay in a villa with olive trees and a swimming pool. Now and then we would argue over something silly but we would soon make up and watch something fun on TV together. Mama would have been normal and I would have been normal. There’s no way Mama would have been the way she was if my dad hadn’t died. If he hadn’t been as good as killed by his brother, like Mama said. It was all his fault.

Will Cassiobury. Mama had finally told me the name of my dad the day before she died. Did she know even then what she was going to do? Is that why she told me? Must have been. She must have planned it that way. She must have wanted me to take my revenge. She couldn’t do it herself because she was too messed up by him – but I could do it for her.

Fired up, I hammered my dad’s name into Google. I scanned the results quickly but couldn’t find anything about a Will Cassiobury who died in a ski accident. But when he died newspapers weren’t really online – at least not in the full-on way they are now.

However, there were other ways to research, and I was determined. People still managed to find stuff out before the internet. I was going to do the same.

Mama, I won’t let you down.

I spent a lot of time at the library. I told my various foster families that I was studying and because I moved home and even sometimes schools so often those days no one noticed that my marks were dropping. While I still went to school most days, all my spare time was spent trying to find out about my dad, so I pretty much never got my homework done. It seemed unimportant compared to this.