She starts pressing buttons on the door – she needs to get some air in the car. Claire sees and puts her window down by pressing a button on her steering wheel. Her hatred of Claire is only increased by this gesture, and the fact that Claire doesn’t seem to notice only irritates her more. But what does she expect? How would Claire like it if she had taken the one precious thing she has in the whole world? She’d seen it once, on her keyring, a boy – or girl – with ginger hair, around eight or nine. On the back of the keyring it read Best Mum Ever. Chloe doubted it. It didn’t seem fair that her kid was at home, waiting for Mummy to come and play house when she had spent her day destroying another. Not that Claire would understand her loneliness, her loss. For some reason it’s the photograph of Angela Kyle’s parents that pops into her head, and she feels that connection again, as if they are the only two people in the world who might understand how she feels.

Claire drops Chloe outside Nan’s house. She turns to wave until Claire has driven away. But she doesn’t go inside, not yet.

Instead she waits until she sees the car go round the bend and then she puts her keys back in her coat pocket and walks in the opposite direction.

Chestnut Avenue is a long, broad road curved at each end, disguising both where you came from and where you’re headed. Neat brown-brick semi-detached houses stand two-by-two and small front gardens peer out from behind short walls topped with privet hedges. Beside each house is a driveway, some still with the original garages; others have expanded and swollen, giving birth to extensions and extra bedrooms over the years. Between the pavement and the road there are grassy verges and planted occasionally within them, guarding each pair of houses, are the great trees that give this street its name. Throughout the decades, these trees will have seen it all. It is in many ways an unremarkable street, but to Chloe, its symmetry has a certain perfection to it.

Chloe walks towards the curve in the road, crossing a junction, onto the next part of the street. All the time she walks, she tries to picture it twenty-five years ago. She passes a Catholic church on a junction and peers inside the thick wooden door. In her mind’s eye she sees the younger versions of Maureen and Patrick, the ones in the black and white photographs that filled the newspapers that autumn back in 1979, and she imagines them just a few years before, filing into this very church each Sunday, a tiny Angie in their arms and a congregation made up of neighbours who cooed over the new baby while her parents took communion.