After going to Sudbury with Hannah and learning that Eileen had fled, he had contacted a private investigator friend, calling in a favour. The police were already looking for her, so he didn’t hold out much hope of finding her first. Bill Wickham was insistent he didn’t know where his mother had gone to, but the PI placed a tracker on his car anyway. Eventually it had paid off.

Liam had been at Hannah’s, having just agreed to go back to Hixton with her to her mother’s anniversary party, when the PI tried to call him and he had quickly found an excuse to leave. The following day he had gone to the house in Lincolnshire, finding Eileen in the garden.

She had been hanging out washing and looked surprised when she spotted him.

‘What the hell are you doing here?’

‘I just want to talk.’ Liam had kept his tone reasonable, though everything inside him seethed. This was the woman who had stolen Miles from him and he hated her with every fibre of his being.

‘I already told you to piss off. Get out of here or I’ll call Bill.’

The conversation had continued. Liam trying to talk her round, Eileen becoming more worked up. He wasn’t going to leave until she spoke to him and he told her that, threatening to make a call of his own and let everyone know where she was.

She had stared at him then, her mouth twisting cruelly. ‘Those little bastards deserved it,’ she had taunted. ‘You should have heard them beg.’

For the briefest moment, she seemed to struggle with her balance, the anger that had been twisting her features dropping away to resemble something that looked like confusion.

Then she had collapsed.

Looking back, he supposed he had spotted the signs. The drooping of her face, the slurring of her speech moments before it happened. As she lay on the ground, she tried to reach a hand out to him. Her words when they came out were a weak whisper. ‘Please… help me.’

He could have called for an ambulance, but instead he remembered the frightened little boy who had been locked inside a box and buried alive in the ground.

Had Eileen ever experienced terror like that?

He had stayed with her for ten minutes, told her all about his little brother, savouring the shock on her face when she realised who he was, and then he asked her if he should forgive her.

Eileen didn’t answer him. Her eyes had filled with bitterness and hatred, and, he thought, self-pity, as a single tear had escaped.

‘I didn’t think so,’ he’d told her.

Giving her one final glance, he had turned away from her and headed to his car.

From there, he drove back to Norfolk and to the Airbnb he had hired in the pretty town of Wells-next-the-Sea, where he took a few days to process his actions.