As I approach the house, I notice that someone has balanced a toy truck—one of those little metal ones—on top of the low brick wall enclosing the strip of concrete that passes for our front garden. For some reason, our wall seems to have been designated as the home for the street’s lost property. The day we moved in, it was a man’s leather glove.

Ross once joked that whatever you leave outside your house in London, someone will invariably take it, and that sometimes it’s cheaper than going to the tip. Which might explain the chest of drawers that’s been plonked on the pavement at the other end of the street.

It’s only when I come a little closer that I realize this isn’t a toy truck.

My stomach clenches. It’s a little train.

7

THEN: AFTER

MONDAY, AUGUST 27, 2007

It’s been three days since Alice’s funeral, and I haven’t left the house. There’s nothing to leave it for. Not now Alice is gone.

Dad suggested we drive to the seaside. Walk along the promenade and have an ice cream. Sit on the beach. But Mum’s had a migraine since yesterday and I said I didn’t want to eat ice cream and pretend everything was normal, because it isn’t. How can it be normal when I’ve spent the last few weeks being interviewed by the police and going to see a counselor? How can it be normal when Mum and Dad keep talking in hushed voices whenever I leave the room and stop the minute I come in?

How will anything be normal ever again?

It’s nighttime now and I’m lying in bed, trying to sleep. Mum brought me some hot chocolate to drink about an hour ago. She lay on the bed with me and stroked my arms with the tips of her fingernails, the way she used to when I was a little girl. Scratchy tickle, I used to call it. “You’re still my little girl,” she said. “And I hate seeing you so sad.”

I hate seeing her sad, too. And Dad. It’s as if all the stuffing’s gone out of them. They look old and ill. A horrible woman in the supermarket told Mum that if I was her daughter she’d spank the living daylights out of me until I told the truth, and that Mick and Sheena Dawson have a right to know why Alice died.

Mum doesn’t know I know this. I heard her telling Dad in the kitchen when they thought I was upstairs. Dad got really angry and made her tell him who it was, but she didn’t know. “What did she look like?” he said, and the way Mum described her, I thought it sounded like Melissa Davenport’s mum. “Why are people so ignorant?” he said.