But if Abby was honest, it wasn’t hard for her to picture Eddie losing it like that. She thought of him as a toddler, in what Ray had called his ‘apocalyptic temper tantrums’, screaming and kicking uncontrollably until, exhausted, he’d collapsed into her arms. She remembered the times – rare enough to be dismissed, but uncomfortable in the moment – when she saw that fury again: when her usually quiet seven-year-old had thrown himself to the floor of a toyshop, screaming and shaking so that she almost thought he was having a seizure. And Eddie at thirteen, after a girl at school had spread a rumour about him and he’d viciously kicked at the wall, both panicked and enraged. And finally, Eddie in the back yard, hurling a comic book into the she-oak. She thought about the Switch, and about the dark things kids inherit from their parents. Abby had been a fool to think that kind of anger just went away.

‘Mum, please, say something,’ Eddie said. ‘I’m sorry, Mum. I fucked up. Fuck! I fucked up! I fucked—’

‘The magazines are yours, aren’t they?’ she said, half dazed.

‘What?’

‘Give me a second.’

‘Mum,’ Eddie said.

‘Shut up,’ she told them. ‘Just give me a fucking second.’

She glanced into the hall, to where the teenager had kicked off his dirty sneakers. She wanted to throw them in the fire. She wanted to throw him in the fire. She wanted to drink. She wanted to hurt something. The lights in the kitchen were suddenly too bright. There was too much sensory input. She felt overloaded, like a glass beneath running water, like a screaming, squealing, boiling kettle.

‘Alright,’ she said suddenly. ‘What happened next?’

‘Next?’ Eddie asked.

‘After you ran,’ Abby said.

She clenched her hands into tight fists below the table. ‘If you ran, how did his body end up in the water?’

‘The guy had parked his car over on the promenade,’ Eddie said. A startling casualness had crept into his tone. ‘When I reached it, it was like, sounds came back or something. It started to rain and that sort of, snapped me out of it. The car was unlocked and … he had a car phone. I thought about calling the police. I was going to call the police…’

‘But you didn’t,’ Abby said. ‘You called your dad.’

Eddie nodded sadly. ‘I didn’t know what to do.’

She turned to John. ‘What did you do?’

‘I stayed with the man until he…’ John said. ‘I stayed there until Mr Gilpin arrived and found me. When he got there, he put me and Eddie in the back seat of his work truck and had us tell him what happened. He went out to the ferry terminal and was gone for a while. When he came back, he told us to leave.’

‘Leave?’