In the moonlit heart of it, two figures, pressed so close they looked like one. Dark jumpers, dark jeans. Brown head bent over a flood of fair hair.

A branch bobbed across the screen. Joanne shifted the phone out of its way, zoomed in tight.

Night smudged the faces. I glanced at Conway; tiny dip of her chin. Chris and Selena.

They moved apart like they could hardly bear to move at all. Pressed their palms together, shoulders rising and falling with their quick breathing. They were amazed by each other, stunned silent, all in the circle of stirring cypresses and night wind. The world outside was gone, nothing. Inside that circle the air was unfurling new colours, it was changing to something that cascaded and fountained pure gold and dazzle, and every breath changed them too.

I used to dream of that, when I was a young fella. Never had it. Even when I was sixteen years old and ninety per cent dick, I kept away from the girls in my school; scared that if I went beyond the odd snog and grope, I’d wake up the next morning a daddy in a council flat, stuck to the sticky linoleum forever. Dreamed of it instead. Dreams I can still taste.

By the time I got away and found other girls, it was too late. When you stop being a kid, you lose your one chance at that too-tender-to-touch gold, that breathtaken everything and forever. Once you start growing up and getting sense, the outside world turns real, and your own private world is never everything again.

Chris wove his fingers in Selena’s hair, lifted it so that it fell strand by strand. She turned her head to touch her lips to his arm. They were like underwater dancers, like time was holding still just for them and every minute gave them a million years. They were beautiful.

Close to the phone, Joanne or Gemma snickered. The other one made a tiny gagging noise. Something like that in front of them, feet away, the real thing, and they couldn’t even see it.

Selena raised her fingers to Chris’s cheek, and his eyes closed. Moonlight ran down her arm like water. They moved closer, faces tilting together, lips opening.

Beep, end of the video.

‘So,’ Joanne said. ‘Is that, like, enough evidence that Selena and all of them had a key? And that she was doing it with Chris?’

Conway took the phone off me and messed with it, hitting buttons. Joanne flipped out a palm. ‘Excuse me, that’s mine?’

‘You’ll get it back when I’m done.’ Joanne tsked and threw herself back against the wall. Conway ignored her. To me: ‘Twenty-third of April. Ten to one in the morning.’

Three and a half weeks before Chris died. I said, ‘So you and Gemma saw Selena leaving her room, and you followed her?’