Curiosity and fear build inside me, tug me forward until I’m bending down, hand on the zipper of the case. It’s a Pandora’s box—but will it be worse for me to open it or for the police to do it? Other people have ventured here, evidenced in the graffiti on the walls, the empty bottles that litter the garden. Kids, teenagers, here on dares to hang out at the monster house. Other people have done worse than open a suitcase, but it feels like I’m committing a crime as I lift the lid. Greg is still here, unseen, reproaching me.

It is his life inside, but not clothes and passport packed for a trip away. It’s bundles of letters and photographs, the hidden history of a man I never really knew. His own time capsule within the time capsule his house has become since he left.

I don’t read the letters, it’s an intrusion too far. But I flick through the photographs. Some of them are old, 1980s judging by the clothes and hairstyles. I recognize Greg from his smile, rub away the pang in my stomach as I look at him smiling at a girl with her arm slung around him whom I recognize as a young Julia, looking like a red-haired Princess Di with a big frosted pink smile. The decades pass as I flick through the pile. The boys appear, grinning toddlers, mischievous boys, then Ellie. Julia disappears, the photos empty of people, are just of the house, the village, the gardens, the sea.

I stop as I get to the last one and my eye twitches. I stuff the photograph in my pocket and close the case, rubbing the dust off my hands and backing away. The photo I’ve taken shouldn’t be here: it’s a school photo, a smiling class of teenagers. I recognize the uniforms because it’s my school. I recognize it because we have the same photo in an album at home. It’s Bella’s class, my sister smiling in the second row. Three girls along there’s another face I recognize. Nicole Wallace, murdered in that summer of death. Bella’s classmate. Bella’s friend.

The police can’t have left this suitcase here. They would have taken this photograph, wouldn’t they?

I walk back across the room, chased by whispering ghosts, and get halfway when I freeze, all the hairs rising on the back of my neck, my chest tightening until I can barely breathe. Blood whooshes in my ears, pulsing to the beat of my heart. There’s something laid under the desk by the boarded-up front window.