The car slows and we pull up outside Dean House. Of course. Of course it would be here.

Max comes round and opens the car door. He looks hollowed out, as tired as me. What’s keeping him awake at night? Does he hear his own beating heart under the floorboards? It feels like months since I got the phone call from Dad to tell me Julia was dying, not weeks. Months since Max called, me still holding him in my heart then as some tender thing. What is he now? Now that we’ve slept together and I’ve seen his stranger’s face?

“What are we doing here?”

He grips my arm as I stumble getting out. My legs feel numb. “We need to talk. Away from your house.”

“It’s you, isn’t it?” I say, as he half drags me into the house. “It was you in the house with Bella. You in the photograph.”

He looks puzzled, but the look is fake. I saw the skittering look of fear first. “What are you talking about?”

“You were at the house when Greg disappeared. When he died.”

“There was film in the camera, then,” he says flatly.

I nod.

“Where is it?”

“Safe. I don’t have it with me.”

“This is all Jack and Sean’s fault. Why did they have to sell the house?”

God, I thought I loved him when I was fourteen. “What did you do?” I say, and my voice breaks on the last word.

He turns to look at me. “Me? I didn’t do anything. It was you, Tess. It was you. We all…we all went along with your fake memory loss. We stuck together like friends should.”

“You were looking for the camera in my flat, weren’t you? I thought…”

“You thought what? That I was overcome with desire?” He smiles. “Poor Tess.”

“Shut up.”

“Your sister made us cover it up. Hide what you did.”

“I didn’t do anything. It wasn’t me. It was…”

“Who? Me? Your sister? Your sister was the one who made us go there. Telling us stories. Telling us he was a sick old pedo, telling us what he did.”

“Does she have the photos?”

I turn as Lena steps out of the living room.

“I should have known.”

Lena laughs. “Should have known what?”

“Should have known you’d be involved.”

“Of course you assume the worst, don’t you? Still in denial. You with your superior sneer. It has to be Lena, doesn’t it? Lena the troublemaker. Of course I have to be a murderer as well.”

“I know you were at the house with Bella.”

“I told her about him watching you, you know,” Lena says. “The dirty bastard watching you digging about in his garden.”

I shake my head.

“Bella told us. She told us he’d groomed you. She told us he got you there in the house and—”

“No.”