Luke shrugged. ‘I guess she wanted to make sure you didn’t twig she wasn’t Emily. Or else … I don’t know, she seemed kind of obsessed with her, maybe she just wanted to destroy them, fuck knows what was going on in her head. She came back saying she couldn’t find them, that if I didn’t tell her exactly where they were, she’d burn the place down. So I told her they were in the filing cabinet, but she said she’d looked and they weren’t.’ He shook his head. ‘And then she went back and set fire to the flat.’ His face crumpled, ‘She came back that night stinking of smoke, crowing over what she’d done, I was so fucking scared that you’d been killed.’

‘They had slipped behind the drawer,’ Clara told him, ‘I found them by accident.’ She stared at him. ‘But I don’t understand why you never showed them to me.’

‘I rescued them from the house when Emily first disappeared, when Mum was hiding every last one of them away. I wanted to save them for myself. I never looked at them though, I couldn’t bear to. Her going missing was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It was too painful to look at them, so I put them away out of sight.’

A soft breeze swept across the fields, and they walked on until they reached a stile where they sat for a while, looking out across the meadow. The hazy sky was streaked pink and gold as the day faded into twilight. It was perfectly still, perfectly silent, the smell of the earth and grass filling her nostrils, the dying sun warm on her skin. She would miss this place.

‘How are your parents doing?’ she asked.

For a while he carried on gazing up at the sky, but at last he said, ‘Dad’s moved out. Mum, unsurprisingly, doesn’t want anything to do with him since all those other students came out of the woodwork.’

Clara nodded. ‘I’m so sorry,’ she said.

He was silent for a while. ‘What my mum’s had to put up with from him, lying and covering for him for so many years. I hate him for what he put her through.’

‘I know,’ Clara murmured. Uneasily though her thoughts returned to that night in Hannah’s horrible flat, to when Hannah had accused Rose of her mother’s murder. She had seen it, just for a second, Rose’s reaction, the flicker of guilt in her eyes, gone almost before it was there. She glanced back at Luke and firmly pushed the thought away.

Suddenly he took hold of her hand. ‘I love you, Clara,’ he said desperately. ‘I love you so much. Please don’t leave me, I can’t get through this without you.’