‘You let us live here, bring our boys up here, knowing there are dead girls in the fucking garden? Really, Mum? How dare you!’ Nick explodes.

Barb and Tim fall quiet. They’re the only ones who were in the loop all this time. They hold the answers to all our questions. But there’s something in their eyes, in the way they looked at each other when Nick said what he did.

‘No,’ I say. ‘Hang on. There’s something more, isn’t there?’

‘I don’t know if he killed them,’ Barb says. ‘That’s the God’s honest truth. But Tim found a box. I guess you’d call it a trophy box. It was what Bern kept hidden under the tool chest. He went ballistic when he realised Tim had been in there, poking around. I thought he was going to kill Tim.’ Barb scrunches up her face. ‘He had to go; it was the only way.’

‘Why didn’t you have a funeral for Bern?’ Patrick asks suddenly. He’d been quiet since speaking about living with regrets, allowing the conversation to unfold without much interruption until this latest question – one that seems to me to be way off the point.

‘We did. I suppose you just weren’t around because you’d left us with all his shit,’ Nick says.

‘No, Nicholas. I checked the other day. There’s no record of a funeral. Your mother told me there was a memorial service, and she scattered his ashes. No minister oversaw that.’

‘I remember the service, clearly,’ Nick continues. ‘It was one of my standout memories because it happened not long after Tim went missing. It was the worst time of my life …’ Nick’s voice cracks. I can’t look at him.

‘That wasn’t your dad’s funeral you remember,’ Patrick says, tilting his head. ‘Was it, Barb? There was a reason you didn’t want me here, why you fed me false information. Bern hadn’t died abroad while following a possible sighting of Tim.’

‘Yes, of course he did,’ Nick says.

Barb’s face pales.

‘I’m sorry to burst your bubble, Nicholas, really I am,’ Patrick says. ‘But I believe your father died right here, in this house. Isn’t that right?’

‘I’d remember …’

‘At the funeral, your uncle’s from your mother’s side, not Bern’s at all – Barb played a good game. She led you to believe you were at your father’s service. You were young, already so traumatised by your brother’s disappearance I think you’d have believed anything. She kept the charade up because barely anyone attended that funeral – she was his only family – and continued to reinforce it as being your dad’s funeral for all the years afterwards. Clever, eh? Although not feeling quite so smug now, are you?’