I slow down as we drive along the high street. There’s a Costa now and a WHSmith. Greggs is still there – Heather and I used to club together to buy one of their sausage rolls on the way home from school. It’s been updated with an awning and a few rain-spattered bistro tables outside – one of the chairs has toppled onto its side in the wind. The Gateway supermarket has been replaced by a Co-op. And then I come to the clock tower. It’s smaller than I remember and sits in a triangle between a fork in the road. It’s where I – along with most of Tilby’s youth back in the day – used to hang out when we couldn’t be bothered to walk the ten minutes to the sea front. But that was after Heather, when I’d tried to fill the chasm she’d left in my heart by turning my attention to Woodpecker cider and boys. ‘Shit,’ I say, as a lorry beeps at me and I’m forced to move lanes. ‘It’s all one-way now.’ I take a sharp left onto a narrow track. ‘This is Cowship Lane. Look out for number thirty-six.’

Most of the properties are detached with land. Some are bungalows, others barn conversions and then, towards the end of the lane with a huge corner plot and the sea in the distance, I spot it and my stomach convulses.

It’s the house from my memories.

There’s a huge sign now with ‘Tilby Manor Caravan Park’ emblazoned on it at the entrance to the driveway. I’m sure they didn’t have that back then.

Even though, deep down, I’d known it would be her, I still feel a sudden crushing sadness as I turn into the sweeping gravelled driveway with the familiar stone house in front of me. Everything comes flooding back: the long summer evenings, the smell of hay that would tickle my nose and make me sneeze, the tinkle of the pond, the dust motes floating in the fading sunshine of the barn. I know that, from the main bedroom at the back of the house, you can see the sea; her sister’s bedroom overlooked the front lawn, and Heather’s the caravan park in the distance. For a short time in my life this was like a second home.

I swallow the lump in my throat and pull in beside a battered Land Rover. Behind the house is the caravan site – a two-acre field that used to accommodate about eight static caravans, with space for ten tourers – although it’s not visible from here. To the right-hand side of the house is the barn where we used to hang out. It has police tape surrounding it now, a piece of which has come loose and is fluttering in the wind. Is that where it happened? Where Heather shot herself? I’m struck by the horror of it.