She shook her head. ‘Mummy thinks I did it, but I never did! Mummy loves her birdy and so do I.’ Tears welled, spilling from her eyes. ‘I would never, ever hurt Lu-Lu bird.’

Doug held her close. ‘I know you wouldn’t, of course you wouldn’t. It was only somebody playing a nasty trick, that’s all. Or a fox. Maybe a naughty fox did it. Come on, sweetheart, don’t cry, please don’t cry. Let’s get you back to bed.’ I knew he was fooling himself, too scared to admit the truth, but I’d never felt so lonely, so wretched, as I did at that moment. As they left the kitchen I looked up and caught Hannah watching me over her father’s shoulder, her expression impassive now. We held each other’s gaze before they turned the corner and disappeared from view.

4

London, 2017

When Clara answered her intercom it was Mac’s voice she heard, crackling back at her as though from a different world; an innocent, ordinary place where emails weren’t sent that stopped your heart from beating, that turned your blood to ice. ‘Jesus,’ he said after she’d buzzed him up, ‘you look awful. I tried you at work but they said you hadn’t come back after lunch so …’ he paused. ‘Clara? Are you all right?’

Without replying she led him to the computer and pointed at the screen. ‘Read these,’ she said.

Obediently he sat. She watched him as he read, his head bowed, thick black hair sticking out in all directions, his rangy six-foot frame hunched uncomfortably in the small office chair, as though he might uncoil and come springing out of it like a jack in the box. It was good to see him, the band of fear that had been wrapping itself ever tighter round her chest loosening a fraction.

Mac had been Luke’s closest friend since school and spent almost as much time at their flat as they did. He was life as she’d known it only twenty-four hours before: nights out at The Reliance, evenings in with beers and a box set, long, hung-over Sunday lunches in the Owl and Pussycat; private jokes and shared history, the comfort and ease of old friendship: he was the mainstay of her and Luke’s relationship, witness to their happy, normal life – before everything had become so entirely not normal, before the creeping awareness that everything was very far from normal indeed.

‘Holy shit,’ he said, when he’d read the last message.

‘Did you know about them?’ she demanded.

He glanced at her sheepishly. ‘Well yeah, Luke told me he’d been getting dodgy emails, but I didn’t realize they were this bad, that there were so many of them.’