The train arrives at Southampton Central and stops for a minute while it divides in two. He stays in the front half, which is carrying on south, while the other half will travel off towards Portsmouth in the east.

The platform outside is quiet, almost empty. A pregnant woman is sat on one bench with a load of shopping bags next to her and a wailing little girl tugging at the leg of her trousers. A guard in a fluorescent jacket hovers near her, staring up and down the platform with an orange whistle clutched in one hand. Two teenage boys are hunched with their heads together further down. Their eyes are fixed on a phone screen while they wordlessly pass a bag of Maltesers back and forth. He watches them for a moment, then looks away.

It won’t be long now before he gets in to Brockenhurst, and his mum will be there to meet him in the car with that half-worried smile she always seems to have whenever he comes home. It’s like she’s studying him the minute he walks out of the station, searching his face for any minute trace of how he might be feeling below the surface.

They’re spooky sometimes, mothers. It’s almost as if they can take one look at you and know exactly what you’re feeling – like their bond to you allows them some kind of pseudo-telepathy.

He’ll have to try extra hard this time to guard his face when he gets off the train.

If he gives away anything about how he’s feeling this time – even just a hint of what he’s planning to do – his mum will pick up on it and she won’t stop pestering him with questions.

Maybe she’ll recognise it’s got something to do with the reunion – the trip to Rutmoor that he makes most years, and which she’s never felt good about him going on – and then she might try to persuade him not to go.

But he needs to go, that’s the thing.

He’s got something important to do.

Thursday, Part Five

As he waits for the train to divide, his mind goes back to the Friday of that weekend in 2002. Their first day of walking. It’s tricky to pinpoint exactly when things started to go wrong, but if he had to narrow it down – if he had to pick the point when everything began sliding away from them – he’d say it was the argument Tom and Gary had on the Friday afternoon.

The moment their little group started to split.

It wouldn’t have changed anything if they hadn’t argued, of course. He knows that now; if it hadn’t been that it would have been something else that triggered everything, and there was nothing any of them could have done to stop it.