Steve’s hit the Go button. Lucy’s talking faster; she’s not going to stop till we stop her, or till she crashes. ‘There was small stuff, too. Like, since her mum didn’t go out, and they didn’t have a lot of money, Ash’s clothes were always wrong – she never had whatever everyone else in school was wearing; it was always charity-shop crap that was two years out of date and didn’t suit her. I used to lend her stuff, but we were different sizes – that was another reason Aislinn was insecure: she was always, not fat, but a bit overweight – and my mum bought her stuff sometimes, but there’s four of us so there was a limit to what she could do, you know? It doesn’t sound like a big deal, but when you’re twelve and everyone already knows that your dad’s left and your mum’s gone off the rails, the last thing you need is to look like some weirdo.’

This is the stuff Steve likes, and the stuff I’m wary of. He thinks it gives us an insight into the victim. Me, I think about those filters. I already know Lucy’s got at least one agenda that we haven’t pinned down. The Aislinn we’re getting here is totally in Lucy’s hands; she can do whatever she wants with her.

I say, ‘This is gonna sound blunt, Lucy, and I’m sorry about that. But I’m not getting why you two were friends. I’m trying to see it, but I can’t put my finger on a single thing yous had in common. What made it work?’

‘I guess you had to be there.’ Lucy half-smiles; not at me, at whatever she’s seeing. ‘We did have stuff in common. I wasn’t having that great a time in school either. I wasn’t an outcast or anything, but I was always into carpentry and electrics, so the boss mares gave me shite about that and called me a dyke, and the people who wanted to get in with them did it too, and it wasn’t some major torture thing but overall school mostly sucked. But Ash, right? She thought I was great – for the exact same things that everyone else was slagging me about. She thought I was totally amazing, like some kind of heroine, just because I told the other girls to fuck off and did what I wanted even though they didn’t like it. Ash thought that was the coolest thing ever.’

The smile spasms into something wretched. She takes a drag off her smoke to force it back under control. ‘And yeah, at first partly I was hanging out with her because I liked her thinking I was amazing, but after the first while it was because I liked her. People thought she was thick, but that was just because of what I told you, how she was unsure – it made her seem like she wasn’t keeping up. She wasn’t thick, at all. She was actually really perceptive.’