I think about the brown car that the woman mentioned. It couldn’t be the same car, could it? Brown wasn’t a particularly popular colour but what were the chances that it was his car? How could it be? And why now? Was he back? I should go to the police and tell them what I know, but the thought of it makes me feel sick. By doing so I could be taking a sledgehammer to the life I’ve constructed for myself. I would be pulled back into a world I only escaped by the skin of my teeth. Mandy can’t still be alive, so I would be hurting myself for no reason. I walk as briskly as I can back to the hotel, afraid with every passing moment that someone will recognise me and the world will find out the truth. I would die before that happened.

Chapter Ten

Then

Jasmine sat in her room listening to music. She had hooked her desk chair under the doorknob because she didn’t want to speak to her parents, and with her headphones on she wouldn’t hear them if they knocked on the door anyway. She was still cross with her mother for bringing up what had happened at school last year.

Jasmine’s English teacher Mr Morrell – who, for obvious reasons, no longer worked at the school – had tried to kiss Jasmine. He had kissed her. He had mistaken her general enthusiasm for the subject as something else.

Jasmine had joined all the after-school reading clubs and the debate club which James Morrell ran. He thought Jasmine was trying to get closer to him because she was somehow attracted to him, but she just loved books. She had been reading Jane Eyre – a book partly about a girl who was in love with a much older man – and Mr Morrell had misread the signs and took her love of the book as something else and made a career-ending mistake. Frank and Lisa had explained in their usual charitable way that he was young and had not long been a teacher, so had blurred the lines between her love of the subject and her possible love for him.