‘Yes, I saw them,’ Patrick says. ‘You’re not so innocent yourself, are you, Chloe? None of us are, not if we’re really honest. Not one of us can get through this life without telling some lies, we just better hope the consequences aren’t too painful. But we’ve all got something to hide, Chloe.’

‘So why didn’t you tell Maureen? About the cuttings, I mean.’

‘And extinguish the only flicker of hope she’s had in twenty-five years? I’m a coward, Chloe, don’t you know that by now? Perhaps that’s another reason I told you we weren’t at the park. Maybe I knew by then that somehow we were bound in this together.’

They sit there like that for a long time. Patrick broken by his confession, Chloe trying to take it all in – even her own culpability. Finally, he speaks.

‘So what now?’

‘What do you mean?’ she says.

‘Well, are you going to tell Maureen? Are you going to be braver than I ever was? Are you going to be the one who breaks her heart? To tell her that her husband and her best friend . . .’

Chloe looks out of the window. Patrick continues:

‘I mean, she’s sitting there at home, waiting for fish and chips, all this time thinking that you could be our Angie come back. So what are we going to do? What the hell are we going to do?’

She hates the way he says ‘we’. But he is right. She is complicit.

‘I . . . I don’t know,’ Chloe says. Where to start?

Patrick sighs. ‘I thought she’d have given up this silly fantasy by now. I thought she would have woken up to the truth, but she’s talking about doing a piece in the paper, about informing the police, and what do we do then? I mean, it’s ridiculous, it’s all out of control, and all because I couldn’t break my wife’s heart nearly three decades ago. I’m a fucking coward.’

He leans his elbows on the steering wheel and covers his face with his hands. In the dimness of the interior light, Chloe sees his hands are still stained in places with the blood of the hare. She knows that will wash off, but some things cannot be undone. If this is really what happened, then she had got Patrick wrong. Perhaps he was right, perhaps it would have been crueller still to break Maureen’s heart all those years ago. The chances that it could have brought back Angie were still slim. He had weighed them up and decided to risk it, and he had lived with that decision every day since. In some ways, yes, he was responsible for his daughter’s death, but not in the way that Chloe had imagined. Patrick wasn’t a killer.