I tried to hand it back and she thrust it towards me again.

‘Just ask her,’ she said, a steely note in her voice that was new to me.

I found myself taking the cutting and putting it into my pocket.

Who was this Alice Adebayo woman? What did she have to do with Anya? And, presumably, with Michael or Liam?

Irene sighed deeply and sat down heavily on the sofa.

I glanced up at the photos on the mantelpiece again; at her two lost sons. She didn’t seem like the kind of mother you would want to abandon so cruelly. The chances were that Liam was dead too. Then there was Michael: overweight, unappealing Michael who had become fixated on beautiful Anya and, when he couldn’t have her, brought about his own death.

Because he did. The detail of what had happened on that cliff didn’t really matter now. At least this old lady could try to move on with her life a bit.

‘Elliott,’ she said now, her voice very quiet.

‘Yes?’

‘I don’t know you and I don’t know your wife … this Anastasia, or Anya as you call her. I didn’t get a very good impression of her, I’m afraid to say, but I suppose now I have to accept that it may have been a shock, me turning up like that. Especially if my son had been …’ she visibly swallowed ‘… been bothering her. But you seem like a nice young man.’ She paused again. ‘Do you honestly think that my son killed himself?’

I looked her directly in the eye.

‘Yes, Irene,’ I said softly. ‘I’m so sorry.’

She closed her eyes for several moments.

Nausea was rippling inside me now. The pot-pourri smell seemed overpowering and it was yanking me back-back-back. I lowered my head to look at the floor, trying to turn off the memories of being twelve, in Mrs Mack’s neat front room, on the cusp of doing the worst thing I have ever done. I’d betrayed one old lady and now I was doing the same thing to another. I had to get out of here.

But despite all those bad feelings pumping through me, despite all my guilt, my work there that afternoon wasn’t quite done. Because, staring down at the floor, I noticed something just under the coffee table near my shoe.

The originals of the photo-booth pictures that we had received in the post.

Irene was still gathering herself, dabbing at her nose with a tissue. I did it before I could talk myself out of it; pretended to reach down to scratch my ankle and enclosed the worn rectangle of paper in my fist. I kept it in my palm and then slipped it into my pocket.