‘Cassie, for God’s sake . . .’ I made myself stop, soften my tone. She was just upset, acting up. Benji’s hot little hand was crushed in mine. ‘If you know anything that could help your father, you need to tell me now. Could someone have come in? From the lane or . . . the woods?’

‘I didn’t see anyone.’ Later, when Benji wasn’t here, when I had sorted my thoughts into some kind of order, I would have to ask her what she was doing out there for long enough to know no one had come in.

‘What about the front gate? If everyone was drunk, maybe nobody saw anything.’

‘Jake was in the garage. He’d have heard someone coming in.’ She touched her phone when she said his name, and I wondered had they been texting, if that was even allowed. How Jake was feeling, where he was. I should try to find out, see if he needed clothes or food. He was almost an adult, but that didn’t mean he could look after himself. Cassie went on, ‘Also, next door have that stupid camera.’

She was right. Our neighbours, a seventyish couple living in a six-bedroom house, were so paranoid about security they’d installed a camera that was trained on their front gate. If anyone came past down the lane, it would have shown up. The police would get the tape, surely.

Cassie had been scathing when we talked about getting a similar one. It seemed wise, living so close to the woods, and there’d been burglaries in town. For God’s sake, Mum. Why don’t you put up a steel fence too, keep the poor people out? Now I realised with a leaden weight in my stomach that the camera might be our downfall. Because if it showed no one else had come into the garden that night, where did that leave us? Either my husband was a rapist – but no, I couldn’t even countenance it, of course he wasn’t! – or my best friend was a liar. Both of them had already betrayed me. As I sat there, watching my son cry and my daughter turn away her cold, set face, I just didn’t know what I believed. I was caught in the middle, unable to help anyone. I just had to hope a miracle would occur, some way to explain all this without losing either of them.