We said awkward goodbyes at the front door. I wished her luck and told her again how sorry I was. She did something strange then. She reached up and touched my cheek, gently.

‘I think you’re a kind man,’ she said. ‘It wasn’t easy for you to come here. Thank you.’

As the front door closed I began to run. I managed to get round the corner before throwing up all over the pavement, watched by an elderly man in a flat cap who was mowing his lawn.

ELLIOTT

On the M11 I had to force myself over into the slow lane after a lorry driver suddenly seemed to come from nowhere, blaring his horn at me and sending adrenaline through me like hot acid.

Shaking, I made myself focus on the road ahead, as rain began to fall. Soon the conditions were terrible, with spray bouncing off the lorries and causing a lethal mist that made me cling to the tail-lights of the car in front that glowed like hot coals.

There really had been something of Mrs Mack about Irene Copeland. Maybe it was the grey curls and the glasses, or the look over the top of them that seemed to go through to your soul.

The final part of that terrible story began to play out in my mind again, just as it did on a semi-regular basis, usually when I couldn’t sleep.

Kieran hadn’t hung about.

I’d dragged myself into school the next morning with my first bad hangover.

It had been a rough night, coming home in the state I’d been in, and Mum frantic with worry. We’d rowed – I couldn’t even remember the content of it the next morning when I woke with a splitting headache, and a pool of sick on my bed. I had to throw the pillow away in a bin round the back of the flats, before Mum handed me a bucket of cleaning products, her face grim.

I remember glancing at Mrs Mack’s closed front door that morning and convincing myself that everything would be okay. No harm done.

Mum ranted as I cleaned up, about how living in this place was sending me in a bad direction, and how inconsiderate people were in general. I was only half listening and didn’t pay any special attention to her saying Mrs Mack’s television had been unusually loud the night before. This was something she did sometimes, when she claimed certain people on television ‘mumbled’. It didn’t register with me at all, then, only later.

When I came home from school the following evening, after playing football, the world was stained with flashing blue lights.

I watched, along with the rest of the floor, as the stretcher was carried out of the flat, Mrs Mack looking smaller than she ever had as queen of her kitchen, baking up a storm.