I turn the stiff cardboard pages that have browned with age and examine the old photos stuck under the sticky plastic. There are several of Ross in his school uniform as a solemn-faced little boy.

Something frightening is ticking away at the back of my mind. All these coincidences keep stacking up. Things that on their own aren’t particularly odd, but that taken together add up to something very odd indeed.

Catherine working at Ross’s GP practice out of all the possible GP practices in the country where she might have ended up. Mum and Sheena Dawson being best friends. The ICL baseball cap in the drawer upstairs. And now this: the neighbor who looks a bit like his mother and who’s wearing an identical pendant. It’s the sort of thing a grieving person might do, isn’t it, wear something that belonged to her late sister?

But Ross’s aunt lived in Sittingbourne, in Kent. That’s where he went to live when his dad couldn’t look after him anymore. At least, that’s what he told me.

With trembling fingers, I examine every single photo in the album, making sure to look not just at the subject of each one, but at what’s in the background, too, and on the edges of each shot, to see if something—anything—jumps out at me.

When it does, it’s like a blow to my solar plexus. I double up in shock and the photo album shoots off my knees and lands on the floor with a dull thud.

44

It’s a group photo. Ross and the “old gang” from ICL. He’s kneeling down at the front in the middle, his head turned to one side, mouth open wide in what looks like either a laugh or a yell. The others are gathered around him. A loosely arranged huddle of confident-looking men and women—mostly men—in their twenties.

Several of the faces at the back are partially or completely obscured by the heads and shoulders in front of them. But there’s only one figure I’m interested in right now, and that’s Ross. Because of what’s on his head: a navy baseball cap worn the wrong way round, the straight red lines of the letter “I” just visible where his head is turned.

I stare at it in disbelief. There must be hundreds of those same baseball caps in circulation. Thousands, even. It doesn’t prove anything. Of course it doesn’t. So why is my heart hammering like a Kango drill? Why is sweat breaking out in the small of my back?