‘Football in the winter, cricket in the summer,’ he says. ‘That’s where they had all the candles and stuff. For Jacob.’

Conversation over then, Freya thinks. ‘Robin,’ she says instead. He stops. She’s been thinking about this, and she wants to share. ‘Do you think Josie would have kept anything from that time?’

He pauses. ‘Like what?’

‘Like diaries, newspaper reports. Anything that might explain Finn’s involvement.’

She can see Robin thinking. ‘His weather notebooks, maybe. Josie mentioned she still has them.’

‘How would they help?’

‘He recorded all the measurements from his weather station. He had this home-made thing, cobbled together out of wood and random electronics. Twice a day, he’d write them down, without fail. But when we were older, he wouldn’t let me see the notebooks, and I suspected he was also using them as a diary. Thoughts and feelings and the like.’

‘Suspected?’ Freya asks, with a smile.

Robin returns her expression with a guilty grin. ‘I might have sneaked a look. Once or twice.’ He pauses, and Freya can see the conflict on his face. A huge part of him probably doesn’t want to know, but as a cop, it’s a pure bloody-minded urge to find out the truth. She regrets bringing it up.

‘It was thirty years ago,’ she says. ‘There’s no way she’d have kept them all. Besides, we can’t search Josie’s house. We can’t get in, for starters.’

Robin’s still thinking, his gaze set towards the hill and the row of houses in the distance. ‘Josie used to have a broken window lock. Finn and I would use it to get in the back door when he forgot his key.’

‘She’d have fixed it by now.’

‘Probably,’ he says, almost to himself. Then he looks at Freya. ‘If she has, that’s it. We go home.’

‘And if she hasn’t?’

Robin leaves the question unanswered. Just starts striding away across the green.

39

They walk back up the hill, up Daccabridge Road, towards the alleyway at the back of the terraced houses. Robin reaches over the fence and unlocks Josie’s gate, and the two of them go across the tiny patch of lawn to the back door.

Robin’s not sure what propels him towards this disaster. What does he hope to gain from searching Josie’s house? For something that might not even exist?

He stands next to Josie’s back door, the window to his right. It looks like the same crappy single-pane glazing, but there’s no way the lock will still be broken. She must have fixed it by now.

He glances to Freya; she’s looking at him uncertainly. Then he puts his palm on the window and pushes it to the right.

At first it doesn’t move, but then slowly, surely, it starts to open. He pushes it enough to get his hand through.

‘What now?’ Freya whispers behind him.