I stare from one officer to the other, expecting some sort of follow-up. I’m not simply holding onto the back of the sofa for support any longer, it’s the only thing holding me up. My legs are jelly.

I killed Tyler.

Me.

Not Dan with that stun gun; not Jason with his cryptic remarks about people getting what they deserve. Not Frank going after his own son for whatever reason.

None of them.

It was me.

When I woke up in that field in the early hours of Tuesday, Tyler’s blood was on my car.

‘Are you okay?’

It’s PC Marks who speaks. She’s calm, using that measured tone that public service workers like police officers, doctors and nurses can pull off so well. Dan does it, too. For a long time, I believed it was because someone genuinely cared. After the arguments with Dan, the passive aggression and the breakdown of our relationship, I’ve become confused about it all. I’ve wondered if that tone is an act. I’m muddled at whether strangers really do care.

‘Surprised, I suppose,’ I manage.

PC O’Neill responds this time, asking to talk to Olivia.

Dan seems a little bemused and I can’t read him. I’m not sure how but I make my way to the stairs without my knees giving way. There was a second after they confirmed it was Tyler’s blood in which I assumed they knew everything. They were here to arrest me and it was game over. As it is, it’s not even me they want to talk to. It should have been obvious. The clearest reason for his blood to be in our garage isn’t because I hit him with a car, it’s because he spends time at the house with Olivia. At some point, they were in the garage and he cut himself. Simple.

I forget about the creaky stair and wince as the screech echoes through the house. I push open Olivia’s door and whisper ‘Liv’ through the darkness. She’s a groaning mass of bedcovers as she asks the time. I reply that the police want to speak to her and she sits up so quickly that it makes me jump backwards. Like a scene from The Exorcist.

‘Have they found him?’

‘No.’

There’s a pause as she wriggles against the sheets, fumbling her legs over the side of the bed. ‘He’s not…?’

‘They don’t know,’ I reply. ‘They’re not here to say he’s dead. They only want to talk to you.’

She says she’ll be right down and so I turn on the light and close the door for her, heading back downstairs to sit awkwardly with the officers. Dan’s on one of the sofas making small talk, out of place in his running shorts compared to their uniforms and my regular clothes. There’s nowhere for me to sit other than next to him and it feels so weird. We’re husband and wife, yet we haven’t sat by one another in years. It’s always on separate sofas, or across from each other if we end up going out for a meal with mutual friends. I’m paranoid that the police must notice our awkwardness. He’s in one corner, me in the other. It’s like either or both of us have a contagious disease that the other is trying to avoid. If the constables do see it, then they say nothing. Instead we talk about weather and roadworks. About plans for the weekend and what’s on telly tonight. The usual. I play the part well enough, or think I do; my stomach is doing cartwheels.

It takes around five minutes for Olivia to come downstairs. She’s in jeans and a T-shirt. Her hair is unwashed, the pink dull and faded. She still has bedhead. I ask if she wants my spot on the sofa but she’s already plonked herself cross-legged on the carpet in front of the officers as they explain about finding a patch of Tyler’s blood in our garage.

Olivia turns to look at her father and me and it’s clear she has no idea what’s being talked about.

‘How do you know it’s his blood?’ she asks.

‘The sample from your garage was tested and compared to the DNA database,’ PC O’Neill says. ‘Mr Lambert is in there because of his shoplifting convictions. It’s a one hundred per cent match.’

He waits for another question and, when it doesn’t come, adds: ‘Do you have any idea how Tyler’s blood could be in your garage?’

I look to Dan and then Olivia, hoping somebody other than me might answer.

Dan’s the first one to speak with an odd-sounding, ‘I’m not at home much.’

It’s true, but it’s a strange way to answer the question. I think he realises it because he then offers a prompting, ‘Liv…?’

‘No,’ she says. ‘We never went in the garage.’

This is bad. This is really bad.

PC Marks writes on a pad while PC O’Neill leans forward. ‘You never went in the garage?’ he asks. ‘Not once?’

Olivia shrugs. ‘Why would we? None of my stuff’s in there. I never go in there, let alone Tyler.’

‘Is he interested in cars at all?’

‘He couldn’t care less.’

‘Have you ever left the house through the garage?’

‘That’s what the front door’s for.’

She replies clinically and it’s good to know it isn’t only me she can make sound like a fool.

PC O’Neill is unmoved. ‘Is there any chance he could have gone in there by himself. When you weren’t around, perhaps?’

‘Like when?’

‘I don’t know. That’s what I’m asking.’

There’s frustration in her voice when she replies. That annoyance that other people don’t see Tyler as she does. I’ve heard it so many times myself. ‘No. He wouldn’t go in there without me.’

The constable holds her in a firm gaze for a moment and then nods.

There’s a silence in which I can’t help but think of all the quotes from television. Things like, ‘It’s always someone close to the victim’. It sounds like a cliché but it’s probably true. Do they suspect Dan? Me? Olivia? Is that what this is about?

‘That does leave us in rather a quandary,’ PC O’Neill says.

‘Why?’ Olivia replies.

‘Because if he never went into the garage, then how did his blood get in there?’

‘I…’ Olivia stops herself and then starts to rock. She can’t answer because she doesn’t know.

Dan’s voice cuts across everything. ‘Perhaps we should get a lawyer…?’

I turn to stare at him and then I realise that everyone’s doing the same. Olivia’s the first to question him.

‘Why?’

‘Because there are questions that none of us seem able to answer.’

I turn from him to a gaping Liv to a pair of officers with unreadable straight faces. Is Dan right? Are we really suspects and this casual visit is anything but? Does he believe Olivia’s not being entirely truthful? Does he suspect me? Or is it guilt on his behalf? He used the stun gun on Tyler for whatever reason and now he’s scrambling to cover himself?

‘I haven’t done anything wrong, Dad.’

Olivia’s stung and the air is suddenly thick, like a smoggy August day before a thunderstorm.

‘I’m not saying you have—’

‘So why do I need a lawyer?’

‘It’s complicated, love. I’m not saying—’

She spins back to the officers: ‘Ask me whatever you want. I want you to find him.’

Dan shuts up but there’s a big part of me that thinks he probably knows what he’s talking about. If the officers suspect Olivia for whatever reason, then she could talk herself into trouble even is she’s done nothing. Not only that, the blood might have come from my car. I should be the suspect.

I don’t know what to do, so I end up doing nothing.

And then Olivia proves how much smarter than me she is by saying something that hadn’t crossed my mind.

‘Do you think Tyler broke in?’ she asks. ‘You think he got in through the back door, cut himself somehow and then bled in the garage?’

Sometimes I can be so thick-headed. PC Marks shifts in her seat and it’s obvious that’s what they think. Why didn’t I come up with that? The answer’s obvious. Not only am I paranoid about Dan and his intentions but I’m convinced I did something awful on the night I woke up in the field.

It’s PC O’Neill who answers. ‘That’s a possibility we’re examining,’ he says.

Classic police speak. It’s up there with ‘proceeding in a northerly direction’.

‘Have you noticed anything missing?’ he adds.

Everyone’s looking at Olivia and she must feel it because she hugs herself a little tighter, shrinking under the attention. The thing with Olivia is that, deep down, we really do share a lot of the same traits. I was happy with my own small group of friends when I was her age, never caring for the approval of adults. She’s like that, too – except her look is her shield.

It took me a long time to realise that I picked the wrong battles with her. Her hair’s pink now – and it’s fine. But I was furious when she dyed it black the first time. It seems so silly now and I don’t remember why I cared. I told her to wash it out but she refused. It was permanent, so I don’t even know why I was arguing. When she turned it silver, I said she was blessed with youth; that older people do all they can to not have hair that colour. I wish I’d simply told her that it suited her. I made a fuss over tattoos, over too much make-up, the piercings. In the end, none of that matters. She’s still the vulnerable, shy, introverted kid inside. All of the other stuff is the way she wants to portray herself. The hair colour, the piercings, the tattoos are about confidence. She likes those things, so it gives her self-assurance. That is then projected to everyone else. It’s a good thing, and yet I tried to make it negative. I made it about me instead of about her.

I never understood that until it was too late.

The wrong battles were fought and lost. When it came to the right battle – Tyler – Oliva was too far gone to care for my opinion. And why should she? I’d been wrong about all those other things.

That confidence she portrays through her look is evaporating now as she pulls at the metal bar that pierces her right ear in two places.

‘I’m not missing anything,’ she says.

PC O’Neill looks up to me.

‘There was fifty pounds in the kitchen drawer,’ I say. ‘Or, I think there was. It’s been there forever – emergency money. It’s gone now. That’s the only thing I’ve noticed.’

Dan says he thinks there was money in the drawer, adding that he’s not noticed anything else missing.

The constable focuses back on Olivia. ‘Do you know of any reason why Tyler might have been in the house?’

‘No.’

‘Or the garage specifically?’

‘No.’

‘Did he have a key?’

‘No.’

We go around in circles for a while. The officers clarify some information from the last time they were here, but there’s no getting over that Olivia insists Tyler wouldn’t have been in the garage. She asks if they have any idea where he might be and they tell her they’ve checked his debit card use and mobile phone records, plus the small amount of local CCTV footage, all to no avail. They’re not as brutally direct as they could be but the message is clear – they have no idea what happened to him.

They do say the quality of photos received from Frank weren’t great and ask Olivia if she has anything better. She scrolls through her phone with practised ease, her thumbs a blur until she twists the screen to show them a selection of images. The officers ask her to email the pictures to them, which she does in about two seconds.

They seem in no hurry to leave and it’s PC Marks who picks up the conversation, asking if there’s anything particular by which Tyler can be identified. ‘Does he have any tattoos, for instance,’ she says. ‘We’ve gone through this with his father but figured you might have a better idea.’

‘He’s got the letters TY tattooed on his chest,’ Olivia replies. She pats her left side, pointing out the spot as the officer makes a note.

‘Anything else?’ PC Marks asks.

‘No other tattoos but he always wears his tags,’ Olivia adds.

‘Tags?’

‘Dog tags. I bought them for his birthday last year. He was really into army stuff at the time.’

‘Is there anything distinctive about it? A logo? Something like that?’

‘It has T-Y on one side and O-D on the other.’ She pauses and then quickly adds: ‘Olivia Denton.’

PC Marks nods. We all got it, but her initials are unfortunate when it comes to a gift for her boyfriend, who may or may not be into drugs.

‘Do you have a picture?’

She does, of course. Olivia flicks through her phone, finding another photo and emailing that to the officer as well. Now that she’s mentioned it, I remember the small rectangle of silver attached to a chain that Tyler always seemed to be wearing. I didn’t know Olivia bought it for him. He played with it absent-mindedly and, though it’s really annoying, there were bigger things to be frustrated about when it comes to Tyler.

The officers check a couple of other things with Olivia but I’m not listening. I’ve done my best to avoid the inevitable, to try to forget waking up in that field, but it’s obvious what I have to do. It was apparent before and even more so now.

I need to find out what happened in the Grand Ol’ Royal Hotel.