He moved towards the flat door, but the mess behind him wouldn’t let him leave. The flat wasn’t secure any more. The home he’d made for himself and his family was ruined. And the bone from the cavity wasn’t the only one. He should be honest with himself about it. There were ghosts beneath the floorboards, and now they were free to roam as they pleased.

He couldn’t put a figure on how many past loves had disappeared beneath the newly disturbed floorboards, but it was enough. There were faces jostling in his mind, fleetingly in focus then fading again. He didn’t want those memories. They were white-hot needles of loss and disappointment in his brain.

Someone coughed. A short bark of a cough from below his feet. A male tone cut short.

‘Who’s there?’ Fergus shouted.

As if he didn’t know. His brother had died in that house alongside their mother. He stamped violently on the floor and was rewarded with a cry in response.

‘Come out!’ he demanded.

Nothing.

‘Why did she choose you?’

There was no reply. His mother had chosen his brother for the same reason everyone else in his life had chosen someone else. Because Fergus wasn’t good enough for them. He never had been. He lay down on the floor, his mouth to the floorboards.

‘Come out, come out, wherever you are,’ he sang.

No response. The ghosts had gone quiet. They always did when he needed them most.

Fergus crawled to the cavity, lying on his stomach and letting his head dangle into the hole, peering into the darkness. He looked around, his eyes adjusting to the gloom, breathing in the scents of time and decay.

‘I see you,’ he hissed. ‘Did you think you could hide?’

Hair, dirty, bedraggled.

A pink dress.

He recognised her, although she was different now.

‘You’ve lost weight,’ he said. ‘I wondered where you’d gone.’

An earwig of a memory squirmed in his brain. A man called Finlay from Wester Hailes – a nasty piece of work – delivering the woman to him, a baby in her arms. He’d exchanged money for them, and at the time that had seemed easier than kidnapping a woman himself. But the woman wasn’t right for him, spoke barely any English, and the baby had screamed and screamed. He was better suited to be a father to older children, he’d realised then.