That was four or five years ago. We haven’t been to Weston as a family since. Jake and Kira have been a couple of times since they started dating but that doesn’t explain why there are tokens in my bag now. I take a closer look, examining them for a date or time stamp but they’re generic arcade tokens with the words Grand Pier printed in the centre. They’re exactly the same as the ones Billy collected all those years ago. I found some more recently, a few months before he disappeared, stuffed into the pocket of his jeans when I was doing the washing. There was a receipt too, for a room in a hotel. A few days earlier the school had rung me to say he hadn’t turned up for registration and, when I called him on his mobile, he wouldn’t say where he was, just that he was fine and he was hanging out with some mates. It was a lie. He’d obviously skived school to come to Weston with a girl. He wouldn’t say who and we grounded him for two weeks.

So where did I get these from? Could I have won them? In the six hours between leaving Liz’s house and finding myself in a bedroom in Day’s Rest B&B did I visit the arcade and play a game? Why?

I delve back into my handbag, pulling out wodges of paper, tissue packets, empty paracetamol blister packs and several red lipsticks. I remove my phone, my house keys and my make-up compact. In the bottom of the bag is a shell. It is tiny, no bigger than the pad of my thumb, pale pink with darker pigment along its scalloped edges. I went down to the beach then? Another memory comes flooding back, of me walking hand in hand with Jake and Billy along the beach when they were very little – two and six years old. The tide was out and we had our shoes off, our toes squelching into the sludgy sand. Every couple of seconds one of the boys would dip down, dig around in the sand and then jubilantly offer me a shell, stone or bottle top. Anything they spotted would immediately become the most precious of spoils, thrust upon me until my pockets were full.