They sat in the car, ‘Precious Memories!’ between them.

‘We can do this later?’ David said anxiously. ‘We could go to a hotel, and you could have a rest?’

She smiled gently ‘No. You’ve come all this way. Let’s do it now. I think it’s the right time.’

So he showed it all to her, explained it all to her – the train tickets, the photographs. God, it was so good to be honest, come clean, even show off a little.

‘Really? You didn’t know I followed you? Really? I followed you all the way to your house.’

‘I didn’t see you,’ Jenny said after a pause. ‘You’re… very good at following people.’

‘Thanks! And I saw you pass that pub. What was it called?’

‘The Fox,’ Jenny said softly.

‘The Fox, yes. I saw him hurt you. I…’ He shook his head. ‘I’m still ashamed of myself. I didn’t help you. I should’ve helped you.’

‘That’s all right,’ Jenny managed. ‘You don’t need to… feel guilty.’

‘Really? Honestly? I’ve felt bad about that for years. Anyway, I collected as many of your photos as I could. They were all over the road, and… I got as many as I could. And I gave them back, d’you remember?’

‘In the coffin? The box like a coffin?’ Her voice was still soft.

He groaned humorously, nodded. ‘God. Sorry about that. It was only once you’d got it that I realised it looked a bit coffin-like.’

‘You saw me get the box too?’

‘Mmm. Well, not right when you got it because I overslept, but yeah.’ His smile faded. ‘I didn’t mean to scare you. It was meant to be a nice thing, but you thought it was from Marc, that he was threatening you, that he’d found you, and, well, I had to make it all right again.’ He took her hand carefully. ‘I had to. You went off to see him and I had to make sure you were safe, so I followed you again. You’re sure you want to hear all this?’

She nodded then, and smiled. A sweet smile, if a little tired. ‘It feels… great to finally understand everything. But, I’ve got a bit of a headache. I need a Coke and some paracetamol maybe. There’s a shop around the corner, I’ll just nip out,’ she said.

‘I’ll come too.’

They walked to the corner shop. While David chatted happily, Jenny made sure to look straight at the security cameras. All four of them.

Back in the car he anxiously watched her take the pills. ‘How long have you had a headache?’

‘Oh, it’s not bad, let’s carry on talking.’

‘Have you eaten?’ he asked. ‘You need to eat.’

‘I will. I promise. Can we drive somewhere else now though? Somewhere quiet, near the sea, and you can tell me everything?’ She smiled. ‘It’s time I knew everything, don’t you think?’

And so they drove to a miserable scrap of land on the edge of a caravan park. The windows fogged and the air grew humid, but Jenny didn’t take her coat off – he hoped she hadn’t caught a chill? ‘No, no,’ she reassured him. ‘I’m fine, I promise. Tell me about this. Is it…?’

‘Yes. Marc Doyle’s hat.’ David looked at it, his expression a queasy mix of pride and hatred. ‘After I sent the pictures back? In the box? I followed you to his house, and I saw him hurt you again. It made me so… mad. And you were being so brave, and there was I, cowering behind a wall, doing nothing… so I stayed. After you left, I stayed, and I followed him too.’ He smiled fondly at the memory.

‘Where did you follow him to?’ Jenny asked softly.

‘To the canal,’ David answered her dreamily. ‘It was raining. Remember the rain that night? I was soaked through by the time I got to the canal. I caught a rotten cold, not a cold, worse. I even ended up in hospital, it was pneumonia, d’you remember I was off school—’

‘Tell me about the canal’

‘Oh, yes. So I already had the knife; I picked it up in his garden,’ he told her. ‘And the knife bit went OK, but he didn’t fall down. And so I had to think quickly. You know what I did?’ He smiled gleefully in recollection.

‘No. What?’

‘I ran up to the top of the bridge and I threw a rock at him! A big one.’ David pulled it out of the kitten box. ‘Look, here it is.’

‘And that’s how he died?’ Jenny asked softly.

‘Sort of. He was like Rasputin though!’ David laughed, shook his head. ‘I mean the knife hurt him but didn’t, you know, put him down; the slab put him down, but even then I still had to push him in the water, and he didn’t sink for ages, and—’ He stopped, his smile faded. ‘I’m not going on and on, am I? Talking too much?’ he asked anxiously.

‘No. No, carry on. I’ve… always wanted to know what happened.’

‘Don’t want to bore you.’

‘You’re not.’ She coughed, paused. ‘What about Freddie?’

David’s face darkened. ‘I’m sorry about that.’

‘Are you?’

‘I shouldn’t have let it get that far. I should’ve told him to back off and leave you alone. He was bad for you. He fed off you.’ David’s voice rose. ‘And he stole from me, spied on me. And he frightened Mother.’ David shook his head.

‘Tell me, David. How did you get him there?’

‘I didn’t. Ryan did. You know this though—’

‘Yes, but it was all so… stressful. I might have missed some things. Can you tell me again? If you don’t mind, I mean? If I hear the whole story in one lump, it might make me… understand a bit better.’

David nodded soberly. ‘OK. So Freddie texted me – sorry, he texted Ryan.’ He smirked. ‘And he said all these awful things about me. He’d found things. You know. And I didn’t want him to,’ David screwed up his eyes and mouth, searching for the right phrase, ‘make things more difficult. He’d done that enough. He was going to carry on doing it, too.’ Then he paused. The smirk almost faded, disappeared. ‘I know this might still be… difficult to hear. But he’d seen the scarf. Your mum’s scarf? I couldn’t let him tell anyone about that. Obviously.’

Jenny stiffened, coughed, took a sip of Coke. ‘What scarf was that?’ she asked carefully.

‘The scarf she had when she died. The one with the roses.’

‘And how did you get hold of that?’ Careful, very careful. She put one cold hand in her pocket.

‘Because I was there,’ David told her. ‘I was there, when, you know…’

‘When she died?’

‘Yes.’

Jenny left a long pause. ‘Have you told anyone about that?’ she asked.

He shook his head. ‘No. Nobody.’

‘How long… how long did it take?’ Jen’s voice was shaky.

David placed a hot hand on her knee. ‘Not long. Once I got her up, it was easy to push her down. And it was quick. I mean, I don’t think she suffered.’

‘You did it? But—’ she stopped then. ‘Tell me what happened with Mum.’

‘I don’t really want to talk about this.’ David was solicitous. ‘It’s too painful for you, and you’re tired and—’

‘I’d like to know.’ There was force in her voice.

David, hesitated, capitulated. He told her how he had listened to Sal crying, a weak, pitiful sound, an annoying sound, and then something told him to get up, get up and approach her. When he saw the scarf, he almost didn’t bother with it, but then something told him that it was Significant, so he stooped, picked it up, wound it around one hand. Then he advanced towards the sniffs and moans and found her, half frozen, her nose clotted with slushy blood, one leg caught on something buried in the snow…

He had stopped a few feet away and lowered into a squat.

She’d fixed him with one exhausted eye. ‘Hurt my leg.’

David had tilted his head, smiled.

‘Help me up?’ Sal had gasped. One hand made a feeble attempt to push herself up. David did nothing. She raised her voice. ‘Help me up! Please!’

He had tilted his head again. ‘Oh, d’you need help?’ He extended one hand. She grabbed it with surprising strength. Her other hand made clawing movements in the snow. One woeful eye winced. ‘Nearly there,’ he’d told her.

‘My foot’s caught!’ she gasped again. ‘Can’t feel it.’

David had stayed silent while fate flooded in. He closed his eyes. Opened them.

‘You should’ve been a better mother.’

Sal had stared at him. ‘What?’

‘What?’

‘Whadyousay?’ Sal was exhausted now. The cold had crept to the centre of her, shutting pieces of her down, one by one. ‘Whuyousay?’

‘I didn’t say anything.’ He smiled back. ‘Lean on me.’ He helped her up. It had been like picking up a sack of manure. Sal had been weak, wobbled and dragged one mangled foot behind her. She’d smelled of gin and indifferently brushed teeth. David turned her away from the house, further into the hills, but she’d been too cold and drunk to notice. She had noticed one thing though…

‘Zatmyscarf?’

‘Yes.’ David had looked down at his still wrapped hand. ‘D’you want it back?’

‘What? Yes, I want it back.’

David had smiled broadly. ‘Well, you’re not getting it back.’

Sal sagged, stopped, looked at him, then looked around. ‘What? We’re not… we’re not … right direction, where’re… we going?’

‘Let’s walk. Nearly there,’ David had said cheerfully, holding her arm firmly, painfully, but not hard enough to leave a bruise. ‘What?’ Sal asked fearfully. Her eyes held an expression that he’d only ever seen before in dying animals: a dulled, wary acceptance. ‘Why? Where we going?’

‘Don’t worry’ David had said. ‘You’re with me now.’ And he had given her a hard shove down into one of the deepest hollows, a place he knew was treacherous with boulders, and watched as Sal slid messily down, clutching uselessly at the snow. He heard the sound of her head hitting the rock. He saw the movements her legs made – those strange, scurrying motions one sees on the gallows. He had wondered if she’d bleed, and if so, whether he’d be able to see it from there.

‘I waited for an hour and she didn’t move.’ David reached for Jenny’s hand. ‘And I knew then that she was—’

‘Dead,’ Jenny whispered.

‘Yes. Then, I went to find you, but you’d already gone to Freddie’s house, and then, of course—’

She removed her hand from his and shrank back against the car door.

‘You see? I told you. It’s too much information for you, you’re sick, and, you’re tired, and—’ He ducked his head, trying to look into her eyes. ‘Did I do the wrong thing? Jenny?’ She was shivering in her coat, shaking. She gave a low moan, shrunk into a crouch. His chest constricted with alarm – what was wrong, what was wrong? Jenny? Je—

And then her boot smashed into his nose.

‘Jenny? Wha—?’

Her heel slammed into his temple, then his throat, and she was screaming, shouting. ‘You killed my mum!’ And she kicked, and kicked and kicked until his head fell against the steering wheel, and the sound of him trying to breathe through his broken nose filled the car. She paused then. Closed her eyes, concentrated, opened them and shouted: ‘Don’t! David!’ The shout became a scream, a different type of scream – a fearful scream. ‘No!’ as she grasped the knife that had killed both Marc and Freddie, and thrust it into David’s throat, ground it in using all her strength, and then wrenching it back out, turning away from the splash of his boiling blood, letting her screams merge into whimpering, weeping.

After a minute, she put her hand in her pocket, brought out her phone and tapped to stop record.

Then she stopped crying, shook herself, took off her coat.

David, a mass of meat on the steering wheel, stared at her with fading eyes as she gritted her teeth and turned the knife on herself, scoring defensive slashes on her forearms. The blood gurgled from David’s neck, and his eyes grew dimmer dimmer dimmer, watching her check her face in the mirror, watching her tear some hair loose from her ponytail, punching herself in the face, wincing, then again. He was still alive when she got out of the car, as she walked across the isolated car park, while she jogged and then ran towards the lights of the pub she’d noticed on the other side of the caravan park.

He died just as she fell through the door, gore-streaked and screaming for help.