They mentioned unexplained injuries and bruising, further test results from the postmortem. Things I knew I hadn’t done, but I’d gone too far then and I was too scared to speak up. Heidi was unravelling. I couldn’t make her life harder. And yes, I was a coward, too. I was scared of prison. I was scared of losing Heidi and Lily. I was scared that all anyone would see me as from now until the day I died was a cold-blooded killer.

Chapter Sixty-Six

Ciara

Now

I’m digging around upstairs trying to find my father’s diary, where I made him admit his crimes, when I hear Heidi call my name. She sounds almost hysterical, so I abandon my search and run down the stairs to find her pacing the living room.

Heidi is shaking her head. ‘No,’ she says. ‘You’re not making any sense, Alex. Why would you say that?’

‘Say what?’ I ask.

Alex looks at me, his face pale. ‘I did it,’ he says. ‘It was me.’

I feel dizzy, then I look at him again. Alex. Gentle, quiet Alex. I’m supposed to believe he was a killer? It just doesn’t ring true.

He speaks, tells me his story, and I try to absorb what he has said. He sat and watched Joe die. He could have, maybe, helped and he didn’t.

‘But you didn’t kill him?’ Heidi says. ‘You didn’t kill him. He was just sick and he passed away, and that means no one is guilty.’

‘But I didn’t get help,’ Alex says and he looks wretched. ‘I was so angry. I’d read those words and I was so enraged. I’d wanted to kill him. I was happy to watch him die. I never thought it would end up like this. All this hurt and pain and a murder investigation, and the further it went, the less I felt I could speak up.’

I’m stunned. It seems Alex, who I’d written off as wet and pathetic, had a backbone after all. He’d watched my father die. But at the same time, he didn’t have enough of a backbone to speak up about what really happened and to save us all from the nightmare we’ve been going through over the last few days. The topic of every over-the-garden-fence conversation in Derry, police interviews, newspaper reports, existing together in a virtual ticking time-bomb of tension.

‘I want to talk to the police now,’ he says, nodding. ‘This has all gone too far. I can’t run from it any more, Heidi. None of us can. We have to be honest. We can’t keep going on like this. None of us can,’ and he glances in my direction.

Heidi looks as if she’s trapped in the glare of oncoming headlights. Except the headlights are coming from all directions and no matter where she turns, where any of us turn, there is no way out of this. She is shaking her head.

‘But you didn’t do anything wrong, not really wrong. He was very ill. He was dying. We don’t have to tell the police. There is no way they could ever know. We just keep it quiet. It might go away.’