‘He is nice,’ Mac said. ‘He’s just a bit of a fuck-up underneath it all.’

‘What right has he got to be fucked up?’ she said angrily. ‘I mean, you’ve met his parents, seen their beautiful home …’

Mac was silent for a while. ‘Did he ever talk to you about when Emily went missing?’ he asked.

She glanced at him. ‘No, not really,’ she admitted.

He nodded. ‘I moved down to Suffolk from Glasgow right after she disappeared. I was the lanky new kid with a weird accent. The other lads made mincemeat of me, until Luke stepped in. We just hit it off and, well, I was only a kid, but fuck me it was a horror show round at his place for a while.’

Clara frowned. ‘Go on.’

‘They were all totally destroyed by it. Rose went to bed for months and barely ate or spoke. His dad barricaded himself in his study and Tom went completely off the rails.’

She looked at him in surprise. ‘Tom did?’ It was a side of Luke’s rather uptight, pompous brother she wouldn’t have guessed at.

‘Yeah, it was like he’d just checked out of the family. He was sixteen by then and hanging out with a bad crowd – off getting pissed and high, that sort of thing, you know? I think Rose and Oliver felt they’d lost their grip on him. But the point is, after that it was as though Luke became the centre of their world, like they became fixated on him. With Emily gone and Tom out all the time, everything began to revolve around him – he was still only ten when she left, remember.’

‘What do you mean, “fixated”?’

Mac shrugged. ‘They’d never leave him alone. He couldn’t move without them breathing down his neck. They wouldn’t even go out for the evening without him, even if Tom was around to keep an eye on him. They became obsessed with everything he said and did, his schoolwork, how he was feeling, what he was thinking, every word that came out of his mouth … It was intense, like they wanted to make up for how wrong things had gone with Emily.’

Clara frowned. ‘OK …’ she said.

‘Well, so anyway, maybe growing up like that made Luke feel responsible for his parents’ happiness, for everyone’s happiness. Or maybe the attention lavished on him made him a bit selfish, a bit entitled. But you need to hear from him how sorry he is, how much he regrets it. He told me it was over with Sadie, he said it was the worst mistake he’d ever made, that he didn’t want to lose you. I believed him. Honestly, Clara, I really think it made him realize how much he loves you.’