Jo reached into her pocket and pulled out a photograph. ‘ABC,’ she said, putting it into Allison’s unresisting fingers. ‘I’ll never understand why our mother thought it was amusing.’

Allison, Beth and Cassie. It was a worn photo, the faces of the three children softened out of focus by the years. But Allison would have recognised it anywhere.

‘They lied to me.’ The thought had never occurred to her. Why would it have done?

‘I asked them to,’ Jo admitted. ‘I knew you’d come looking for me when you finally got out of whatever institute you finished up in. I didn’t want to speak to you on your terms; I wanted to speak to you on mine.’ She ran a finger over her face. ‘Perhaps I’d hoped to look more normal by the time we met. It hasn’t worked out that way, though, has it?’

Allison didn’t want to look up from the photograph, didn’t want to see what she’d done to the pretty child who’d sat cross-legged beside her on the back lawn of their house.

‘It was taken late that summer, only three or four months before you burnt the house down.’

* * *

It wasn’t me. It was the monster. My plan had been simple, but it had gone wrong. It had started all right. I’d pinched myself to keep awake as the house quietened around me. I waited till a minute past midnight. A new day for my new life. Then I took the kerosene heater out, turned it on and carried it carefully from my room. I had to put it down to open my parents’ bedroom door, only a little, afraid they’d wake and see me, and my plan would have been destroyed. I was only nine, so perhaps my apprehension can be understood. But I hadn’t taken it into account. Nor the fear-slippery hands that picked up the heater and passed it through the gap to put it down on their carpeted floor… the cheap carpet worn and rucked.

I shut the door quickly, so I didn’t see the heater topple over, and when I came back with the rolled-up towel seconds later to lay it at the base of the door, I thought it was supposed to smell that way.

I was back in my bed within seconds, cuddling under my duvet, grinning at my success. It was several minutes before I heard the first crackle. I sat up, confused, and switched on the light. Wisps of smoke curling under my door startled me into clambering from my bed, frightened of what was happening the other side. I opened the door, my eyes widening to see the landing thick with smoke and a bright orange flame piercing the darkness. There wasn’t supposed to be fire. Just carbon monoxide.

Something had gone terribly wrong.