The next day, I try to get in and see Mr Hunter again. Phil’s been dragged off by her uncle Marcos for some family thing, so I take Cardy with me instead.

‘A heart attack?’ he whispers to me as we walk into the hospital.

‘That’s what Helena told Shad,’ I reply. ‘Out of nowhere. A massive heart attack. Dropped dead in her cell a few hours after Helena talked to her.’

‘That seems like –’

‘A hell of a coincidence? Trust me, I know.’

‘Can fairies do that? Make it look like someone died of a heart attack, when –’ Cardy gestures futilely.

‘I don’t know,’ I reply. ‘But here is what I do know. I know that apart from you and Phil and Holly, Helena was the only person that knew Matilda helped us that night. Helena was the one that went to see her. Helena saw her a few hours before she died.’

‘You think Helena did it? Weren’t they friends?’

‘Helena was an Unseelie changeling,’ I say. ‘She’s been telling me that she thinks of me as a little sister for years, and she still blabbed to the Unseelie that she thought I was the Valentine when she knew that meant they’d try and murder me. Selling out Matilda is completely on brand for her.’

‘So she – what, poisoned her or something?’

I shrug. ‘Maybe. But we screwed up the Unseelie’s plans big time when we broke up the Riders. We knew there would be retribution – and I’d bet a lot of money that this is part of it.’

‘This is so messed up.’

‘I can’t believe I defended her,’ I say. ‘Yesterday, I was all, “Don’t worry, Shad, Helena loves you, and it’s so nice Matilda has a friend looking out for her!” I should have known better.’

Cardy gives me a strange look. ‘That’s your takeaway from all of this? Really?’

‘Of course it isn’t,’ I say. ‘But I have to take this one problem at a time, Cardy. If I stop to feel bad about this now, I’m going to fall apart.’

‘How can you just shove it all down like that?’

‘Did you know Phil thinks she killed her own mother?’

‘What?’

‘She told me it was an equation,’ I say. ‘She got angry, so the Riders came, and they killed her mother. A + B = her fault.’

‘But it’s not.’

‘Of course it’s not, which is exactly what I told her. And that’s why I can’t let myself do the maths on this one, Cardy. If I even begin to think about how I’m the reason Matilda got put in jail, and I’m the one who told Helena that she helped us – if I do that equation –’

‘God, Pearl, I wasn’t saying that this was your fault! I just thought –’

‘If I give myself time to feel bad, I’ll do the maths,’ I say. ‘And if I do the maths, Phil will do her maths, and I am not going to let her. So instead, I’m going to focus on the things I can do. I’m going to get into Mr Hunter’s hospital room. I’m going to put Finn’s magic hair bracelet on him. And I’m going to get him to tell me how to rip a hole in the universe.’

‘Okay,’ Cardy says. ‘What do you need me to do?’

‘You’re my cover,’ I say. ‘Your mum works here. No one will think it’s weird if you’re wandering around the corridors. We can bypass whoever’s on the desk. And then all I need you to do is watch the door.’

But there’s already someone watching Mr Hunter’s door.

‘Hello, Miss Linford,’ the cop says cheerfully.

‘Hello,’ I reply carefully.

I’ve faced way worse things than a lone cop. I called the Crown Prince of the Seelie fairies a liar to his face, FFS. So how is it that this – this! – is what turns my blood to liquid nitrogen?

‘How are you today?’

This is somehow the hardest question I’ve ever had to answer. What if I say ‘fine’, and he’s like, ‘Well, that’s proof you’re a sociopath: didn’t your best friend’s mother just die? Our old murder suspect died, so we need a new one, and you’re under arrest’? Or what if I’m like, ‘not great,’ and he’s like, ‘Oh, you’re sad Matilda died? You’re obviously a murderer, and you’re under arrest’?

‘That’s a silly question, isn’t it?’ he says, still smiling. ‘Of course things must be rough for you right now.’

‘Yes,’ I choke out.

‘What brings you here today?’

Oh, I’m just here to visit Mr Hunter, I could say airily.

You mean the dude Matilda tried to murder? the cop would say back. We knew there was an accomplice. Here to carry on her work? You’re under arrest.

‘We’re, uh, here to see my friend Dave,’ I improvise, and flee.

‘What the hell was that about?’ Cardy hisses as I pull him away down the corridor, fast. ‘Why did you – wait, what are we doing?’

‘Visiting Dave,’ I say. ‘If that cop comes to check up on me, I want to make sure he doesn’t think I’m lying.’

‘Who’s Dave?’

‘My ex-boyfriend,’ I reply, pulling him into the room and kicking the door shut behind us.

Dave’s asleep, but his TV is on. The sound of the Boxing Day test match is a haze of white noise over the top of the beeping of the machines. I sit down in one of the plastic chairs beside his bed and try to get my breath back.

‘So?’ Cardy says. ‘What was that?’

‘I’m sorry,’ I say. ‘I just – so much terrible shit has happened, but the thought of getting arrested terrifies the living daylights out of me.’

‘Pearl,’ he says, ‘he was perfectly nice to you. You’re a pretty white girl. No one’s arresting you.’

‘But I’m connected!’ I say. ‘To everything! Every murder that’s happened in this town, I’m involved. And when they work out that I called Matilda the night Phil’s mum got killed –’

‘If that was going to be a big deal, they would have questioned you already.’

‘What if they’re building a case against me? What if they’re gathering evidence? What if –’

‘Look, are you going to be okay here without me?’ Cardy interrupts. ‘I want to get back to my research.’

‘Research?’ I ask blankly.

‘I’m trying to work out who they took,’ he says. ‘The fairies. For me and Marie, when they took Tam and your sister.’

‘Oh,’ I say. ‘Um. About that. I have something I should tell you.’

I relay what Finn told me about Rhymer and the Green Man and the prince and the field of flowers. It’s not exactly a long story, but as I tell it, the expression on Cardy’s face gets more and more furious, and when I finish it, he stands up and walks over to the window, clutching the sill so hard his knuckles turn white.

‘He’s okay, Cardy,’ I say to his back. ‘For now, anyway.’

‘Why didn’t you tell me this straightaway?’ he demands.

‘Honestly? I forgot.’

He turns around. ‘You forgot?’

‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but I have kind of a lot on my plate right now,’ I say. ‘Did you catch that bit in that story where Finn broke up with me and tried to brainwash me into keeping calm and carrying on? Or the thing where Matilda got murdered by my sister-in-law? Or the thing where I’m trying to hold Phil together, and hold myself together, and –’

‘Okay, okay, okay,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry. I shouldn’t judge, I know. But the thought of those kids …’

He leans back against the window sill and closes his eyes. ‘There are so many stolen kids in my family tree, Pearl,’ he says. ‘My grandma was stolen. So many of my uncles and aunties were stolen. There are whole parts of my family I might never be able to track down because the government stole them from their parents.’

‘Oh, shit, Cardy,’ I breathe. ‘I didn’t even think about what this must mean for you.’

‘Another kid got stolen from his family, because of me,’ he says. ‘They needed a fake Cardy, and so this kid – Rhymer – lost everything.’

‘Don’t do the maths,’ I tell him. ‘You can’t let yourself do the maths.’

‘It’s too late,’ he says. ‘I’ve already done them.’

‘We’ll get them back,’ I say. ‘Rhymer, and my sister, and whoever they took for Marie. We’re going to get them all back.’

‘Not if the fairies kill them first,’ he says morosely.

‘Rhymer’s all right. Finn saved him. He won’t let anything happen to him.’

‘Forgive me if I don’t have the same faith in him as you do, Pearl.’

‘Don’t get me wrong, I’m furious with him right now,’ I say. ‘When we get him out, there is going to be a conversation, believe me. He makes some horrendous choices.’

Cardy makes a noise in the back of his throat.

‘But he makes them because he’s trying to protect people,’ I go on. ‘He’ll do everything he can to protect Rhymer, and whoever they took for Marie, and my sister.’

Cardy doesn’t look convinced, but he lets it go.

He leaves after a while, but I end up sitting by Dave’s bed for almost an hour and a half, simultaneously lost in my thoughts and boxing up the ones I can’t think about right now and shoving them into the back of my brain to deal with later.

There’s only so much you can repress, though. Some of it always bleeds out. ‘Sister,’ I whisper, reaching out and touching the pale, papery skin of Dave’s hand. ‘I have a sister.’

Of course he doesn’t say anything back, but it’s kind of comforting, really. Sleeping people don’t judge you for taking the whole concept of having a twin sister you never knew about and putting it in the too-hard basket, along with all those deaths and disasters that you can’t admit you’re responsible for.

I psych myself up to make another attempt on Hunter’s room, but the cop is still there. ‘Goodbye, Miss Linford,’ he says as I walk by him. ‘Have a nice day.’

‘You too,’ I say, forcing myself to sound bright and genuine and sincere, and to walk at a normal pace instead of running away.

I’m pretty despondent about how badly I wussed out over the whole police guard situation, but Phil gives me a pep talk later that night.

‘Use your personality on them,’ she tells me. ‘And that teacher’s pet suck-up voice you have. That always gets results.’

‘I have no such voice.’

‘Yes, you do. Remember Ms McGregor?’

‘That was Year Four!’

‘And you had her eating out of the palm of your hand. Imagine what you could do now.’

‘Okay, okay, I’ll try again. Come with me?’

‘I can’t,’ she says. ‘They finally managed to get in contact with my dad. His flight back from Greece gets in tomorrow night, and I have to drive up to Sydney with Uncle Marcos to go meet him. Just him and me, in a car together, for six hours.’

‘Do you want me to come with you?’

‘No. I want you to go and wake up Hunter and find out what he knows.’

I nod.

‘And I want you to recommend me podcasts or audio-books or something. I’m going to need something in my ears. Constantly.’

The next day, I give myself a pep talk. Phil’s right. I do have a Look-at-me, what-a-nice-and-responsible-young-lady-I-am voice I can pull out of the bag. And if I have Cardy – AKA Haylesford’s most responsible and socially conscious young gentleman – by my side, then there’s no way the police will do anything but say, ‘Oh, of course!’ when I ask, ‘Would you mind if I ducked in to see Mr Hunter for a moment? He’s my music teacher, you see, and we’re close.’

But when Cardy and I are there, and we’re walking down the corridor, and I see a different cop at Hunter’s door, I wuss out again.

‘Hello, Miss Linford,’ the cop says.

‘Hi,’ I say.

‘How are you today?’

‘I’m uh – you know. Hospitals.’

The cop nods sympathetically. ‘They’re not nice places.’

‘We’re just here to see my friend Dave,’ I say, and yank Cardy away.

He’s shaking his head as I pull him into Dave’s room. ‘Sorry, sorry, sorry,’ I say, sinking into the same chair as yesterday beside Dave’s bed.

‘It’s not that,’ he says. ‘Am I invisible? It’s like they didn’t even see me.’

‘You’re not on their Most Wanted list,’ I reply, trying to stop my hands shaking.

Cardy pulls the door almost closed, so the latch is resting against the doorframe. ‘I need to show you something,’ he says in a low voice, pulling up a second plastic chair beside mine. ‘I think I found Marie. The other Marie, I mean. Look at this.’

He shows me his phone. It’s a newspaper article. Baby snatched from hospital, reads the headline.

I look closer. It’s from the 16th of February in the year we were born, published in the local paper from Byalla, which is about four hours down the coast.

‘Look at the picture,’ he says. ‘Don’t you think they could be Marie’s parents?’

I zoom in. He’s not wrong, I suppose. I never met the real Marie’s parents, but if she’d introduced this couple to me and been like, ‘Hey, this is my mum and dad,’ I’d have believed her.

On the other hand she could have said, ‘Hey, these are two random people entirely unrelated to me,’ and I’d have believed that too.

The parents’ faces are stiff and drawn in the picture. They both have bags under their eyes, and lines etched so deep they look like they’ve been drawn there. Bill Matthews and Su Mei Huang are offering a financial reward for any news about baby Rosemary, the caption reads.

‘I haven’t found anything about Rhymer yet, but I’m going to keep looking,’ he says. ‘I’m thinking of driving up to see my grandma tomorrow. Her network of connections is out of control. If one of our kids went missing around when I was born, she’ll know about it.’

‘Cardy …’ I say. ‘We don’t know who they took for you and Marie, but we know who they took for me. And no one remembers my twin sister even existed. Including my other siblings.’

‘I know it’s a long shot,’ he says. ‘I know Finn’s dad probably brainwashed everyone to forget all about them, and I know I’m probably wasting my time. But I have to try, Pearl. Someone has to work out who these kids really are, so when we get them out, we can take them home.’

‘We have to get them out first,’ I say.

‘Hey,’ Dave mumbles. ‘Is that you, Pearl?’

‘Hey, you,’ I say, reaching over hastily and taking his hand. ‘Just thought I’d pop in for a visit. Check up on my favourite ex-boyfriend.’

I think he smiles under his oxygen mask, but it’s hard to tell.

‘Is the cricket on?’ he asks. ‘What’s the score?’

‘Goodbye, Miss Linford!’ the cop says as we go by her on the way out. ‘Have a nice day!’

I’ve never heard someone be so bright and sunny in my life before, and it’s terrifying.

‘You can see me, right, Pearl?’ Cardy asks me. ‘Right?’

How’s the road trip? I text Phil later that night.

The message she responds with is all in emojis, but it very effectively communicates ‘gaaaaaahhhhhhhh’.

Want to come with me to the hospital tomorrow? I text. Cardy’s bailing on me to go visit his grandma to see if he can get the goss on Rhymer’s real identity.

Can’t, she replies. My dad’s flight was delayed, so we’re going to have to stay in Sydney tonight and now he won’t stop talking about all the people he needs to visit here to tell them about Mum, so we’ll probably be here another night as well.

That sucks.

Maybe if I get lucky he’ll delay us so long we’ll miss the wake. I really REALLY don’t want to go.

Let me know if you need anything. I’ve got ninety million more audiobook recs where those ones came from. And I could make you a Spotify playlist too if you want.

xoxo, she sends back.

Everyone always talks about what a problem it is that text messages don’t really convey tone, but I’m kind of grateful for it right now. I’m glad she doesn’t know how disappointed I am that she won’t be back until tomorrow, to be the bolster at my back, to refuse to let me back down or wuss out again.

Because I can’t put more weight on her.

I could get Holly to come with me instead, I guess. Maybe I could even bully Cardy into putting his trip off for a day. But it wouldn’t be the same. I need Phil. I need someone that knows exactly which buttons to press to make sure I do the right thing. Even Finn doesn’t know where all those buttons are.

I wonder if my twin would have been another Phil, if things were different.

What would it have been like if the fairy king never came and stole her away? Would Phil have had competition in the Pearl’s Best Friend arena? Would I have had competition in the Phil’s Best Friend arena?

Would we have had a language only the two of us understood? Would we know each other in some secret way only twins can know each other?

Without ever really consciously deciding to do it, I get up, wheel my desk chair over to my cupboard, and stand on it so I can get the box down from the very back of the top shelf.

There’s dust on the lid. Not a lot – I feel like there should be more – but my hand comes away dirty when I brush it across. Mum stuff, it says, in Disey’s handwriting.

The box isn’t full. It’s barely half full, actually. It’s just some papers, some photos, and a few odds and ends.

I think of Phil’s house, stuffed full with trinkets and decorations and pictures and all kinds of things. It’s going to take weeks to pack up what was left of her mother. But this is all that is left of mine.

The first thing I take out is a bunch of photos. There’re some I’ve already seen: Disey and Shad as little kids, Disey and Shad climbing all over their dad, Disey and Shad, eight years old, sitting by his bedside when he was in hospital before he died.

The only picture of them with Mum is when they were babies, tiny, red, and swaddled. They look identical, apart from the fact that one is wrapped in pink and one in blue, but I check the back of the photo anyway. Paradise and Shadow, one day old, is written in loopy cursive.

Would there have been a picture like this of Mum with me and my twin, if my – our – dad hadn’t been a total deadbeat who hit the road long before I – we – were even born? Did she hold us like that, two pink bundles, tired but happy, her long sweaty locks of red hair falling onto our faces?

She can’t have remembered that she had twins. She can’t have. Finn’s fairy king dad would have taken those memories away from her when he took –

Oyster. That’s what the prince called her. It’s a terrible name, but that’s not why it’s hard to think of her that way.

If I give her a name, then she’s real. ‘My twin sister’ is a concept, but Oyster is real. A real person. A real problem. Another very real thing that I have to think about.

There aren’t many more photos, but they’re mostly of me. Me as a baby, just one baby, in a hospital crib, Disey and Shad awkwardly posing next to me in their Haylesford High school uniforms. Me as a toddler, wearing a frilly dress with my hair in ringlets. One of Disey and Shad as they got ready to go to – I check the back of the photo – their Year Twelve formal, both wearing snappy suits, while I crawled around on the floor behind them.

And one of me with my mother. It can’t have been long before she died, because I’m not a baby or a toddler, but recognisably a small child. She’s sitting at her piano, and I’m sitting next to her, watching as her fingers dance across the keys.

I close my eyes and try to summon up the memory, but I can’t. It’s gone, lost in that abyss of memories we all lose as children.

Would Oyster have been musical? There’s no way they gave her music lessons in fairyland, given the kind of education Tam had. If they didn’t teach him to read letters, the odds are high that they didn’t teach her to read music.

Tam must have known Oyster. He’d know.

I hope they didn’t do as big a hatchet job on her personality as they did on his. What if Oyster’s just as loyal to her master and as bloodthirsty about it as he is about Emily?

Wouldn’t the prince love it if I broke into fairyland, tried to save Oyster, and she tore me apart instead? He’d laugh for centuries.

I look at the photo again. If they’d taken me instead of her, would Oyster have sat next to our mother and watched her play? Would she have begged and begged to learn the piano until her siblings finally caved?

It so easily could have been me that the fairy king took.

The next thing I take out of the box is the program for my mother’s funeral.

It’s kind of nondescript: heavy white cardboard, with just her name and her dates of birth and death on the front. Bland, devoid of personality, but professional, the kind of program no one could ever possibly take offence to. There’s no picture. On the back, it says: Tea will be served after the service, and then Paradise, Shadow and Pearl invite you to accompany them to the cemetery.

I open it up. The funeral that Phil’s family have planned for her mum is epic – there’s a wake before the funeral, the actual funeral, the burial, a funeral lunch, and then a memorial a week later – but there’s no way anyone could have described my mum’s funeral as epic. It was short and simple: a few words from the celebrant, a musical interlude, brief eulogies from Disey and Shad, the end. It looks like the menu to some gala dinner: entrée, main, dessert, get out.

I almost miss it at first. It’s in fine print, right down the bottom on the left-hand side of the page, which is otherwise blank. Music for this service will be provided by Daniel Hunter, it reads.

So that’s what the D stands for. I’d wondered, after I saw it on the file at the hospital. Not David or Dean or Dracula. Daniel.

Daniel doesn’t suit him. Dick, maybe.

Dick, definitely. I heard your mother sing once, he told me, once upon a time. But he neglected to tell me that he played at her goddamn funeral.

That wasn’t all he said, either. And I think you have the talent to surpass her.

If my mother affected him deeply enough for him to tattoo her name onto his body, and he thought I was better than she was, then –

A truly horrifying thought occurs to me. I’ve had my fair share of horrifying thoughts in my time, what with all the fairies and the murders and the possibility of spending the rest of my life in jail, but this thought genuinely makes me want to vomit.

I scrabble around in the box until I find my birth certificate.

It has my name on it. Just mine, no Oyster, but even if all trace of her hadn’t been erased, do they even list twins on birth certificates?

It has Mum’s name on it. It even has Disey’s name on it, because she’s listed as the person who reported my birth.

The space for father, though, is blank.

Okay, Pearl. Let’s think about this logically.

1) Disey and Shad have told you about your father. They didn’t know him well, and there’s not much to tell, but if it was Mr Hunter, don’t you think they would have twigged who he was when they signed you up to lessons with him?

2) If Mr Hunter was so obsessed with your mum that he got her name tattooed on him, wouldn’t he have stuck around to help her with the baby/babies?

3) On top of that, when your mother died, if Hunter knew that you were his, why would he have gone, ‘Yep, I’ll just leave her with her barely adult siblings and only appear in her life to scream at her occasionally when she’s a teenager’?

No. Slow your roll, Pearl. Hunter might have been pulling a massive Snape on you, but he’s not your father.

Plus, there’s also 4) You look nothing like him.

But I have to get into see him. I have to. And when he’s told me how to bash down the door to fairyland so I can get Finn and my definitely-not-his-daughter sister back, he’s going to explain that tattoo.

But on Day Three of my Let’s-wake-up-Hunter-and-make-him-spill-his-guts mission, I don’t even get as far as wussing out and going to sit with Dave while the cricket drones on in the background, because the first person I see when I walk into the hospital is Tam.

He looks like hell. He’s sitting in a wheelchair, covered in so much mud and blood I can’t see where one ends and the other begins. There are deep gouges in his arms and legs, one of his eyebrows is lost in a bloody mess, and there’s a chunk of flesh missing from above his collarbone, just where it meets his neck.

‘What happened to you?’ I ask, before I remember that, oh yeah, he told me that if the first words out of my mouth the next time he saw me weren’t Emily’s location, he’d kill me.

He doesn’t look like he’s in any fit state to be killing people though. His eyes – both swelling with bruises – are only half open.

‘Pearl,’ he says hoarsely.

‘Answer the question. What happened to you?’

‘That’s what we’d like to know,’ a nurse says, bustling over. ‘Are you the girlfriend?’

‘I’m Pearl,’ I say.

The nurse raises her eyebrows.

‘So, um, yes, I guess,’ I finish.

‘Maybe you can get him to talk, then,’ she says.

‘I told you,’ Tam says. ‘I fell.’

‘You fell in the middle of Mannawarra Street?’ the nurse says, raising an eyebrow. ‘Fell so hard you knocked yourself out and did all this damage?’

He says nothing.

‘You nearly got run over, you know,’ the nurse says. ‘You’re lucky the people that found you weren’t speeding, or you’d be dead right now.’

He goes to fold his arms, and then winces in pain.

‘Finn, what happened?’ the nurse asks in a gentler tone. ‘Did someone hurt you?’

He stays silent.

‘If someone did this to him – if they hurt him – we can get him help,’ the nurse says to me. ‘But we need to know what happened.’

‘I’ll – I’ll see what I can do,’ I lie.

She shakes her head. ‘His mother was half-hysterical on the phone when we called her, but do you think she’ll cut her holiday short? Some families, honestly.’

You should go, Finn commanded his parents, a few nights before the Riders came and everything went to shit. Leave Haylesford. Don’t come back. Not until the new school year. Not until February.

Clearly Finn’s commands still work on some people.

‘My mother knows I would not want her to see me like this,’ Tam rasps.

‘Look, can we just get him stitched up?’ I ask the nurse, commandeering the wheelchair.

I have to stand there for a long time and play worried devoted girlfriend as Tam gets cleaned up and sewn back together. ‘You’re a tough one, aren’t you?’ the doctor says to him. ‘Not many people don’t flinch at the local anaesthetic.’

‘He’s very tough,’ I say, putting my hand on Tam’s shoulder. He flinches.

I get a few seconds alone with him when the doctor goes to get some more gauze. ‘What happened?’ I hiss.

‘Why do you care?’

‘Just answer the question, Tam.’

He’s silent.

‘Was it Unseelie?’

Nothing.

‘Was it Seelie?’

He still doesn’t speak, but he gives me a look that says, ‘Um, bitch, remember who my mistress is, the most Seelie Seelie of all the Seelies’.

‘Did you – I don’t know, get into a bar fight?’

That one seems like the most unrealistic option of them all. I can’t imagine any actual humans getting the better of Tam in a fight.

‘You have not kept your promise,’ he says.

‘What?’

‘You promised you would teach me what it meant to be Finn Blacklin.’

‘I was kind of getting some mixed messages from you on that one, considering you basically told me you would murder me if I didn’t tell you where Emily was!’

He looks up at me. ‘Pearl,’ he says, ‘you know, surely, that I would not harm you.’

‘Of course, I don’t know that! The last time I saw you, you were torturing Holly, you nearly broke my wrist, and you threatened to kill us both!’

But then a nurse is there. ‘Okay, big guy,’ he says. ‘Let’s get you into a bed.’

‘Can I come?’ I ask him. ‘I’m his girlfriend, and –’

But the nurse is already shaking his head. ‘Finn needs his rest,’ he says. ‘I’m sure you’re worried, but you can talk to him tomorrow, okay?’

Of course, right when you need someone asking questions, that first nurse – the one who wanted me to make Tam spill all his secrets – is nowhere in sight.

The whole incident sets me so far off-balance that I go straight home without even trying to get in to see Hunter. It doesn’t even occur to me until I’m pulling into our driveway, because I’m too busy working myself into a panic over the police.

They’re going to hear about this, surely. They’re going to go, ‘Wow, Finn Blacklin is horribly injured – wait, isn’t his girlfriend Pearl Linford? That one we suspect of being Matilda’s murder apprentice? And now Matilda’s dead, she must be picking up the murder crown?’ and then they’re going to realise that they forgot to look at my phone records, realise that in addition to me making that suspicious call to Matilda, Finn and I haven’t texted in nearly a week. They’ll assume we’re in some huge fight, and that I’ve practised some of my murder skills on him.

And then maybe they’ll realise that Matilda’s death was not natural causes at all, and they’ll draw a straight line between me and Helena and assume that we’re in this murder thing together.

Okay, maybe they won’t draw exactly those conclusions, but this is surely just helping the case they’re building against me, right?

I spend that night convinced that it’s going to be the night the hammer falls – that Tam’s injuries are going to tip them over the edge, and they’re going to come for me at last – and I have to spend more than three hours texting with Phil to even begin to calm down.

And yet, I remain completely unarrested.

‘Hello, Miss Linford!’ the police guard says brightly to me the next day as I walk down the hospital corridor for Attempt Four at Project Hunter. ‘How are you today?’

‘Not awesome,’ I reply, slipping straight into a script I rehearsed over and over again in the mirror. Don’t wuss out, don’t wuss out. ‘My boyfriend was in an accident yesterday. I’m worried about him.’

‘Oh yes, I heard about that. He had a bad fall, correct?’

‘That’s right.’

Did you push him? I half-expect the cop to say next, but he doesn’t.

‘Everything else is all right, though?’

Do they do some sort of course on smiling at people you suspect of being murderers at police school? I swear this cop’s face has not moved a muscle.

‘Well … no,’ I say. ‘I’m – I’m worried about Mr Hunter as well. He’s my music teacher. We’re quite close.’

‘His condition is stable.’

‘Do you think I could … that I could maybe have a minute with him?’

The change that comes across the cop’s face is so fast and so sudden it’s like when you’re sitting in the sun and then a cloud crosses over and even though you were pleasantly warm before, out of nowhere, you’re freezing cold. ‘No,’ he says. ‘Absolutely not.’

‘I just want to sit with him.’

‘No visitors,’ the cop snarls. ‘Leave. Now. Before I arrest you.’

I don’t need to be told twice.