It felt like a lifetime but he now knows (easy to find online) it would have been two days later that he arrived in Rotterdam. Here, he was wordlessly bundled into another van and deposited at the airport.

Yes, maybe he’d had a choice at that point. The threat to his family had felt real, though.

For a long time he’d told himself that was his sole reason for staying away. But the truth was, he was glad he had a reason not to go back home. How could he be in that house, hearing the train announcements and the ding-ding-ding of the crossing gate without reliving the horror of that night, over and over again?

At first, not contacting home had been hard. But he knew that if he spoke to his mother, he would feel so guilty that he would be on the first flight back. As time moved on, and he went from lying with a needle in his arm in that filthy room in Koh Pha-Ngan, to the life he had now, with Pimchan, it got easier to simply stay away.

But now that there is a chance that he might be a father himself, it sheds a whole new light on what might have been.

As the car shudders with the effect of a huge lorry overtaking him, he feels a pang of pain at the thought of Pimchan. Hard to know when he is going to see her again. Now that they are married, he shouldn’t have trouble getting back into the country, but he has no idea what repercussions may flow from him going to the police. He didn’t cause that poor woman – Alice Adebayo – to be obliterated by that train, but he had been there and was pretty certain that Anastasia would be able to get the most expensive legal representation behind her to twist the truth.

Reading about Michael’s death in a syndicated Kent local news story online was the tipping point that had brought him home at last. His mother was alone now. She needed him. He hadn’t known for sure whether he intended to go to the police at that point, but then his mother had told him what she told him, and it had all come together in his mind.

His brother hadn’t in fact committed suicide, as he had believed; it was all about Anastasia. That evil bitch had turned up, like broken glass in his skin again after all these years. Liam had had to resist the temptation to smash a fist into the old coffee table, which still bore the marks from when he crashed his trike into it twenty-nine years ago.