5 SEPTEMBER

Eleven days after abandonment

26

Ruth and Christie didn’t return to Indigo Park until after dark. Agnes waited with Bette for news of Errol, and of her father. He’d been in the police car with the tinted windows, taken away like Errol to answer questions. She’d tried calling him and Ruth, even Christie. No one was picking up. Bette phoned the friend of a friend, a lawyer, for advice. After an hour, the friend called back to say Errol had a duty solicitor with him at the police station. She didn’t know any more than that.

‘It’s my fault,’ Agnes told Bette. ‘I gave him that scarf.’

‘But where’s it even from? It can’t be anything to do with that poor lassie who died.’ It wasn’t a question, Bette knew her grandson. Agnes was the one she didn’t know. ‘I saw the scarf, very nice but nothing a young lass would wear.’ She was talking about Iris.

‘It was stolen. From one of the houses at Blackthorn Ashes.’

Bette’s stare sharpened. ‘By you?’

Agnes dug her thumbnail into her wrist. She could tell the truth, name her brother as the thief and try to claim back a little of this woman’s warmth and sympathy. But it wouldn’t be the whole truth. She’d gone with Christie, not on the day he took the scarf but every other day. ‘It’s my fault,’ she repeated. ‘I’ll tell the police that as soon as I can get to the station.’

Bette was shrewd enough to read between the lines. Her face softened a fraction. ‘How’s your dad mixed up in all this? They took him in for questioning too.’

‘I don’t know. It doesn’t make any sense.’

That was a lie. The sense it made was so ugly she was afraid to look directly at it. She kept seeing a knife her father had owned when she was small, a complicated multi-tool like a Swiss Army penknife but with more blades, some as thin and wicked as razors. She’d picked it up once, cutting her fingers despite the fact all the blades seemed to be tucked safe inside its handle. The cuts were so delicate she didn’t notice them at first, only a frozen sensation at the ends of her fingers before stinging red beads of blood came up.

Odie lay at their feet with his head turned towards Errol’s room. Every now and then, Bette reached to pet his ears.

It’ll be over soon, Agnes wanted to tell them.

The police will bring Errol back, or Ruth will come home. Whatever happens next, it will be over.

Luke must have given the police a list of everything missing from Silverthorn, including his wife’s scarf and coin purse. Agnes could prove she gave the scarf to Errol because she had the purse that was taken at the same time. She would have to tell the police it was Christie who took the scarf and purse; she didn’t know enough about where in Silverthorn he’d found them, or when exactly he’d taken them. She’d have to tell the police about the keys from Dad’s toolbox, the filing cabinet in the shed and the storage locker behind their caravan where Errol had seen Christie hiding. If she told them Ruth cleared out the cabinet on the day Iris was found dead, the police would search Ruth’s car and find evidence she’d transported the stolen goods from Indigo Park to dispose of them elsewhere. What would her mother do then? This was a murder investigation. Why else were so many police involved? Agnes pinched the skin at her wrist, hard.

Had Errol already told the police Adrian Gale left his caravan on the last day Iris was seen alive? Even if he hadn’t, Bette would. It was only fair, with her grandson caught up in this for no good reason and Dad like Agnes – a stranger.

Had they found some of Christie’s treasure in their caravan, was that why Dad had been taken for questioning? Or had Trevor decided to drop Dad in it, needing to shield himself from scrutiny since he was the one found at the site where Iris died? Knowing his best friend was so eaten up with guilt he’d accept the blame even if it belonged elsewhere.

Agnes thought of the silent plea she kept seeing in her father’s eyes. He’d welcome the blame – a place to put his shame about Blackthorn Ashes, the broken promises and lost lives.

Bette was checking her phone again. Odie whimpered at their feet. Agnes reached a hand to pet him. Her head ached, filling with the puzzles of the last few weeks. Dad’s misery, and Christie’s fury. Ruth keeping watch from a distance, making sure she knew where Christie went. Trevor watching too, looking for an exit strategy, refusing to let this mess swallow him the way it was swallowing Adrian and his family. Then Iris coming with her questions and her hunter’s eyes, like a fox slinking into their hen house. Agnes gave the stolen scarf to Errol because she wanted a friend. But in doing that, she’d offloaded evidence, sending the police in Errol’s direction instead of Christie’s. Could she have done that on purpose, even subconsciously? Family came first, Ruth said. But Agnes wasn’t Ruth. And Errol was her friend, her family. Odie put his ears back at a sound from outside.

Bette said, ‘Just someone changing a gas bottle.’

‘I should get back, make a start on supper. Unless I can help with anything here?’

‘No, you go.’ Bette climbed to her feet. She looked old for the first time, worry lines deep around her eyes. ‘I’ll be getting on with our own supper. He’ll be hungry when he gets home.’

‘How will he get back?’ Bette didn’t have a car and Errol didn’t drive. The two of them always took the bus when they went down to the shops. ‘Does he have money for a taxi?’

‘Enough for a bus, anyway. He’ll manage.’

‘I could go down there,’ Agnes offered. She’d offered this twice already. ‘Then we could come back together.’ She looked towards the window. ‘It’s getting dark.’

‘He’s a grown man. He’ll phone if he needs anything.’ Bette straightened, holding the empty mugs to her chest. ‘It’s not the first time they’ve had him answering questions. Whenever there’s trouble round here, they come looking for the first black face they can find.’ She moved her mouth painfully. ‘We’re used to it.’

The storage locker at the side of their caravan was padlocked. Agnes searched for the key in all the places she could think of. She couldn’t find it. Perhaps it was in her brother’s pocket. Judging by the pristine state of the padlock, the police hadn’t tried to open the locker when they searched the caravan. But they might think of it later, come back with bolt cutters. They’d been through the caravan’s cupboards and wardrobes, searching for whatever they thought was hidden here. Where was Ruth?

Agnes tidied the sitting room and kitchen, washing up the breakfast plates Dad had left undone. The caravan smelt of bacon and eggs; it felt so long ago, that breakfast together. Had she missed her last chance to talk to her father, to tell him she loved him? Had she missed that same chance with Christie and with Ruth? She’d tried to talk to her mother in the night but Ruth had shut her out, thinking silence was the solution. Perhaps it was. If Agnes had been quieter, gentler, easier, perhaps she’d be with Ruth and Christie right now, trusted to help her family weather this storm.

In Ruth’s room, the duvet was folded back from the bed, both pillows indented. Agnes put her hand in the hollow left by her father’s head, looking at the matching ditch in her mother’s pillow. What happened if they never came home, her parents or her brother? What would she do? The questions were too big, crowding her mouth.

She went to the kitchen, searching for something to cook for supper. Before she’d taken the first tin from the cupboard, car tyres sounded in the gravel. Her heart thudded with relief. She put the tin back, wiping her hands clean.

Outside, Christie was climbing from the passenger seat of Ruth’s car. His face was white, chin wobbling. He didn’t look at Agnes, pushing past her into the caravan.

Ruth stood at the side of the car with her head bent over her phone, its screen bleeding blue light through her fingers. Agnes waited for her to look up, for a word about Dad or Errol. Whatever she felt towards Ruth – and her feelings had never been more complicated – her mother held the answers. When they’d fought it was never because she believed Ruth was wrong; they’d fought because she knew Ruth was right. She no longer thought it. But some grain must have stuck because she was waiting for her mother to tell her what to do, how they were going to get through this.

‘Get in the car,’ Ruth said.

It wasn’t what she’d expected. ‘Why?’

‘Just get in the car. I’ll be back in a minute.’

She walked past Agnes into the caravan where Christie had gone. To tell him what? That she and Agnes were going for a drive and he needed to get supper for himself, keep his phone close so he could call her if Dad came home? It seemed incredible she would leave Christie on his own when he looked half his age and scared to death.

Not knowing what else to do, Agnes got into the car, fastening her seat belt. Bette was at the window of Errol’s room, watching. She must have hoped the tyres were a car bringing her grandson home. Seeing her, Agnes suffered a pang of homesickness. She didn’t know which home she was sick for, unless it was here in Indigo Park – where she could be certain of Bette’s kindness and Errol’s friendship. She wanted to go back two days, to when Iris was alive and the worst she’d had to fear was Christie’s retribution for sharing their secret with a stranger.

Bette dropped the curtain across the window, switching off the light in Errol’s room. She said the police made a habit of coming for him whenever there was trouble, ‘We’re used to it,’ but Agnes doubted it was a thing you could get used to, being suspected of something you hadn’t done and would never do. Errol was arch and funny and flamboyant but he was also the gentlest, kindest man she’d ever met. He would no more loot an abandoned house than wear yellow Crocs. The thought of him in a police cell was a blade between her ribs. If she managed nothing else in the next few hours, she had to clear his name, bring him home to Bette.

Ruth got into the car, firing the ignition and letting the engine idle while she fastened her seat belt. She put her phone into the moulded shelf inside the driver’s door, out of Agnes’s reach.

‘Will he be all right?’ Agnes asked. ‘Christie, on his own?’

Ruth didn’t answer. She backed the car from the gravel onto the lane that led in the direction of the cliffs, driving a short distance until she found a parking spot by a hedge of blackthorn. She tucked the car into the space and switched off the engine, opening the driver’s door and getting out, taking her phone with her.

Agnes struggled with her seat belt for a second before she followed. Her mother was making no sense. She had to break into a run to catch up with Ruth who was striding towards the cliff path with her hands in her pockets and her head down.

‘Where’re we going?’

The sunset was spectacular, splashed across the horizon, setting the oil tankers ablaze. The hawthorn sheltered them a little from the rocking of the wind but it was cold. Each step drove a fresh chill into Agnes’s bones.

‘Why did we take the car? We could’ve walked.’

‘And have your brother follow us?’ Ruth threw her a look, as knife-like as the thorns. ‘He knows this path rather too well, doesn’t he? You both do.’

So that was it. They were here so Ruth could punish her for her part in Christie’s transgressions. Agnes matched her step to her mother’s, not shrinking. If this was a battle about who’d done what over the last seven weeks – who’d kept whose secrets – she had questions of her own. Ruth’s green dress glowed in the sunset, her hair too. She was brimming with an energy Agnes hadn’t seen in a long while but which she remembered from eleven years ago; her mother was drawing a sort of fury to herself, getting ready to fight. When they passed the trampoline, Agnes almost suggested they take turns punching it, the way she and Christie did, to work out their rage. At the cliff head, Ruth stopped.

The sea was striking the rocks below them. Agnes drew its salt into her lungs. She was ready, readier than she’d been eleven years ago, readier than she had any right to be after the last few weeks of stress and confusion. She thought of Iris sitting in the cane chair pretending an interest in an empty field when all of her attention – every cell in her body – was focused on getting the answers she wanted to her questions. Ruth had hold of the same energy now.

‘Do you know why we came here?’ Her mother wrapped her arms around her chest, holding her elbows in her hands. ‘To Blackthorn Ashes, I mean.’

‘For a fresh start.’ Agnes pushed her own hands into her pockets. ‘You told me, Christie told me. It was meant to be a fresh start, only I ruined it. I should’ve stayed away.’

‘This isn’t about you,’ her mother snapped. ‘It just isn’t. Are you going to listen?’

She was scared, Agnes realized with a shock. Ruth was scared. The skin under her eyes was strained, every taut line in her face battling against outright terror.

‘Christie was getting into trouble back home. He was suspended from school. We had the police round. I told you about the stealing and the lying but it was worse than that. He’d been getting into fights. He broke a girl’s nose.’

Agnes’s mind turned emptily, seeing her brother putting his fists into the trampoline, not stopping until he was out of breath, until his hands were black.

‘The stealing didn’t stop. Well, you know all about that.’

‘It was only’ – wind knocked against her shoulders, shaking her – ‘in the empty houses.’

‘No. It started before we moved out.’

Ruth caught at her hair, dragging it behind her ears. For a second, her eyes rested on Agnes’s cropped head as if she wished she’d done the same, shaved it all off.

‘Trevor knew. All those times he took Christie to fix fuse boxes, fit batteries . . . Christie was stealing things. Trevor knew but he said nothing, until it suited him.’

‘That sounds like Trevor.’

She took care not to put any emotion into the words but Ruth fired another sharp look at her.

‘You know,’ Agnes said simply. ‘What he’s like.’

Her mother studied her in silence. Agnes waited, watching the sky change colour as more of the sunset flattened itself at the horizon. It was time they talked about this. Not shouted, or fought. Just talked. It was time.

At last, Ruth said, ‘This isn’t about you.’

‘If that were true, we wouldn’t be standing here. You’d have left me in the caravan and taken Christie away, somewhere safe.’

‘Where? Where is it you imagine we can go? There’s no money. There’s the investigation. And now there’s the police.’

‘Has Dad been arrested?’

‘Not yet. Not that I know of. But the way things are looking?’ She showed her hands, their empty palms turned up. ‘Who knows?’

‘And Christie,’ Agnes said. ‘Will he be arrested?’

Her mother shut her hands into fists, shaking her head. A shudder went through her, cold or fear. She closed her eyes then opened them, fixing her stare back in place.

‘Trevor helped you get rid of the evidence,’ Agnes pressed. ‘From the shed at Indigo Park. The things Christie stole. He was keeping them in a filing cabinet.’

‘Trevor helped.’ Ruth’s teeth snapped shut. ‘Oh, he was right there when we needed him. And he made certain we did.’ The air was soaked with her fury. ‘He’s an expert at being indispensable.’

Agnes felt a barb in her chest uncurling.

‘He’s threatening to tell the police about the stealing?’

‘Of course he is.’ Her mother looked exhausted suddenly, wrung out. The red in the sky stained the side of her face. ‘Of course.’

‘And you’re telling me because you think I can do something? Talk to him or—’

‘I’m telling you because it’s over. You need to understand that.’ Her voice dulled. ‘You need to know what to do now. We’ll all have jobs to do.’

‘This isn’t about the stealing.’

The wind hit like a hand. Agnes had to brace her feet against the grit of the path. The trampoline screeched in the hedge, blackthorns scraping at its frame.

‘Is it? Or not just that.’ She thought of the last time Ruth brought her up here. ‘It’s about Emma Dearman. It’s about what happened in Silverthorn.’

Her mother half turned from her, to face the sea. The wind lifted her hair at the nape of her neck, showing the narrow bones there.

‘I found her . . .’ The words left Ruth like a sigh. She blinked at the horizon, keeping her eyes shut a second too long, as if she didn’t want to open them again. ‘That was me.’

‘You found . . . ? What do you mean?’

‘At the bottom of the stairs. Her neck was broken.’

Another slow blink. ‘She’d been dead a while.’ And another. ‘She was starting to smell.’

Agnes wrapped her arms around herself to try and stop the shaking. ‘When?’

‘The morning of the storm.’ Ruth’s voice was flat, flavourless.

‘But the police didn’t come until the next day . . . You didn’t call them when you found her?’

Her mother’s jaw moved drily. ‘Evidently not.’

‘Why?’ Agnes stopped, tried again: ‘It was carbon monoxide.’

‘Of course I’d have called them if that’s all it was.’ Pain twisted Ruth’s face. ‘You think I haven’t thought about that, every day? How I might’ve saved the children if I’d called the police that morning . . . But I couldn’t be sure how she died. I didn’t know.’

A falling sound made them turn, staring into the dark of the path.

Footfall on the loose stones, heavy and quick.

Someone was coming their way, moving with purpose, not caring if he was heard. Agnes saw his head first then his shoulders, fiery from the sunset.

Fear fell through her, the sea tilting across her shoulder. At her side, Ruth had gone still. Her eyes were focused, bright. She’d been waiting for this. For him. That shimmering energy was back, carving something fierce from her face.

Trevor said, ‘This’d better be fucking good.’

‘You came,’ Ruth said. ‘That’s good.’

‘You said this was about Christie.’ He jerked his head at Agnes. ‘What’s she doing here?’

‘Bearing witness. In case you get any more funny ideas.’

He laughed but it didn’t sound right. His shoulders were stiff and wary like his neck. ‘Your kids are the ones with the funny ideas.’ He tossed a look at Agnes. ‘No offence.’

‘Some taken.’

Agnes did her best to match her mother’s tone, rewarded by a flare of disquiet in his eyes. He’d been summoned by Ruth, hadn’t expected to find Agnes on her side.

‘I mean, Christie’s a thief. But this one?’

‘Worse things to be.’ Ruth closed in on him, a narrow movement of her head prompting Agnes to follow suit. ‘Like a murderer, for example.’

Trevor came up short. His smile slipped, losing its footing on his face.

The wind hit him squarely in the chest and he shifted, trying to recover lost ground. Now he was the one with his back to the sea, standing at the cliff’s edge squinting into the darkness at Ruth and Agnes. ‘What the fuck’s this about?’

‘Iris Edison.’ Ruth spoke the name coolly. ‘You killed her.’

Agnes held her breath in her chest, blunt pressure under her ribs. She saw the coil of Iris’s hair in the unfinished house, Trevor standing guard, Christie running in fear.

‘Are you mad?’ The tips of his ears were red from the sunset, demonic, making a carnival mask of his face. ‘I thought she was the one on strong meds?’

‘She’s autistic. She’s not insane.’

It was the first time Agnes had heard her mother acknowledge her diagnosis, the first time the word ‘autistic’ had left Ruth’s mouth.

‘That’s not what you said all those years ago.’ Trevor curled his own mouth, shadow eating his upper lip. ‘Then, you told me she was bipolar.’

‘I was wrong.’

The first time Ruth had admitted to making a mistake.

‘Yeah? Maybe you’re the crazy one. Dragging me out here to fling accusations.’

‘I know you killed her. I can prove it. So you’ll shut up and listen to what we’ve got to say.’

She’d wanted Agnes with her, safety in numbers; she was her mother’s back-up. The idea made her want to laugh, and weep. How long had she waited for this? Ruth taking her side and making her peace. Except it wasn’t peace. It was war. Ruth was waging war on Trevor. Sixteen-year-old Agnes had longed for that but now it was here and she was afraid. Afraid of Ruth, afraid of Trevor.

‘I don’t imagine you meant it to happen,’ Ruth was telling him. ‘Apart from anything else, it ruined your plans for getting Adrian to take the blame for Blackthorn Ashes.’

Trevor squinted, trying for a better fix on Ruth’s face. His hands were bunched in his pockets, every inch of him ready to fight. Agnes could smell the rash of sweat under his shirt.

‘You didn’t mean to kill her, I’m sure. You should make certain the police understand that when you tell them. Did you think she was after a bit of rough? In any case, she underestimated you, thought you were just a builder, someone she could use to get inside the houses.’

Her mother had known all this, without saying a word to Agnes. She’d known Iris wanted a way into the houses, that she’d seen Trevor and mistaken him for a builder. Had she been eavesdropping the night Agnes made her bargain with Iris to leave them alone? She’d thought she was alone in that bargain, but Ruth knew all about it.

‘I imagine it was a stupid, clumsy accident,’ her mother said evenly. ‘Like most murders. You didn’t plan it or want it but it happened, and you didn’t know how to get out of it. Then you thought of Adrian. You were already halfway to getting him to take the blame for the development. Why not this, too?’

Trevor’s boots rasped on the gravel but he wasn’t moving, staying where Ruth had put him at the cliff’s edge. There are two of us, Agnes thought, and only one of you.

‘You lost your head a little, I expect. One thing to get your best friend to take the blame for failing building regulations, another to pin a murder on him. It’s why you were so angry when you were found with her body, because you were panicking. Your plan was coming apart at the seams.’

‘Prove it.’ His pupils were pinheads. ‘You crazy insane bitch.’

‘Oh, I can. Trust me. The police are already looking for you, in fact.’ Ruth’s voice iced over. ‘Did you really think I was going to let you fuck with my family a second time?’

Trevor flinched then, staring as if Ruth was someone he’d never seen before. He was afraid of the words she was speaking – of the truth.

Everything Ruth was saying, Agnes had known. Standing in the unfinished house with rain coming through the roof, seeing Iris on the bricks. Frail gold-brown curls on her cheek, a sweet ripe smell from her body. Not decay. Tobacco. Shreds of Trevor’s tobacco, sticking to Iris’s dead cheek. She raised a hand to her own cheek, remembering. Those shreds found their way everywhere, in her hair, behind her knees. Her sixteen-year-old body had been a crime scene. Never investigated, no charges brought. But Iris was an active investigation; her hands sealed in bags to preserve evidence from defensive wounds, broken fingernails, torn cuticles – Agnes held the answers in the flavours on her tongue. Trevor’s temper, always so close to the surface, too easily flared. She knew.

‘Where’s your evidence?’ he demanded.

‘Right here.’ Ruth brought her hand out of her pocket, holding a sandwich bag sealed across the top. Inside, a small metal tin, battered blue and gold. ‘Yours, I believe.’

‘You thieving bitch . . .’ Trevor’s hand went to his own pocket, slapping its empty shape. ‘You’re no better than your boy.’

‘How do you think I got hold of it?’ Ruth returned the bag to her pocket. ‘There’s more evidence back at the caravan park. In case, as I said before, you’re getting any funny ideas.’

‘I’m getting funny ideas?’ He stared, blood crazing the whites of his eyes. Unable to believe he was being played at his own game. Outwitted by two women. ‘You bitch. I helped you get shot of the evidence from that shed.’

‘And planted some of your own,’ Agnes said.

Trevor’s stare swung towards her.

‘The sand on Dad’s clothes.’

She’d felt its grit on her fingers when she swept the sofa cushions, reminding her of holidays when she was a child. Except the sofa’s sand was rough and orange. Builder’s sand, not beach.

‘You lured him to that building site after you killed Iris, asking for his help, knowing he couldn’t refuse because he’s feeling guilty. You were going to frame him for the building work, in any case. That’s why you stayed close, pretending to be on our side, helping us.’

It was so clear in her head, every frame of it mercury-bright.

‘Dad was your get-out-of-jail-free card. Of course you thought of him after Iris died. After you killed her. Dad was going to be your fall guy again. You made sure he got sand in his clothes, knowing he’d walk it right back to the caravan. I’m willing to bet you were the one who tipped off the police this morning.’

‘You don’t need to bet,’ Ruth said. ‘It was him. Your father’s phone has texts this bastard sent to get him out to the site that night.’

‘I asked for Ade’s help making the site secure because we had trespassers.’ Trevor flung a fierce stare at Agnes. ‘He stayed on site after I went. He stayed on site.’ He bared his teeth at them. ‘What he got up to after that? That’s for the police to find out.’

‘Your tobacco was on her face,’ Agnes said. ‘I saw it.’

‘So? I found her. You were there.’ His jaw knotted as he tried to stare her down. ‘You pair of sick bitches . . . What makes you think anyone’s going to listen to a word you say? You’re on anti-psychotics, for fuck’s sake. As for you, you can’t keep track of your own kids let alone your husband. Your son’s a thief. If I talked to Ade about the insanity up at the site, it’s because I knew he was losing it. He’s been losing it for weeks, in case you give a shit. You think he’s copped out but it’s more than that. If you cared, you’d have noticed. He needs all the friends he can get right now.’

‘And that’s what you are, is it? His friend.’

‘The only friend he’s got.’

Trevor searched Ruth’s face, finding only hardness there.

‘So I texted him, so what? There’s nothing to prove I touched her, let alone killed her.’

‘You have a criminal record.’ Ruth’s voice was full of flints. ‘For assault. Did you really think I wouldn’t check up on you, after what you did? And what you’re trying to do?’

‘Yeah? Funny how you never lifted a finger to stop this,’ pointing with the flat of his hand between his body and Agnes, ‘all those years ago. Pretty sure she’s not forgotten that.’

He was right. Agnes kept her expression blank but her whole body burnt with the need to hear her mother explain why she’d taken Trevor’s side over hers.

‘You think if I’d known I’d have let you get away with it?’ Ruth’s voice was low, lethal. ‘I would have taken a knife to you. As for Adrian, he’d have skinned you alive.’

‘Instead, I get a lecture about flirting—’

Trevor broke off when Ruth made a savage movement with her hands.

‘So you didn’t know. Fair enough. I’d like to know what sort of parent that makes you, missing a thing like that.’

‘I was wrong. About a lot of things. That doesn’t mean I haven’t been keeping count.’ She faced him down. ‘I have a record of everything my daughter told me about you, eleven years ago. And everything my son’s been telling me ever since.’

The papers Christie took from her room at Blackthorn Ashes and hid in the storage locker at the caravan – was that what she meant? Ruth’s insurance policy.

Agnes shuddered, the coldness of it freezing her right through. It was freezing Trevor, too. But he’d learnt to expect no consequences to his actions. Ruth was going to lose this bluff because she’d trained Trevor not to be afraid of her.

The cliff path was shrinking into night, clouds across the sky like camouflage. Below them, the sea held its breath, no longer beating at the rocks.

‘So you thought you’d lure me up here to listen to your sick little stories and then what?’ He folded his arms. ‘I’d break down and confess to killing someone I’d never even met? That’s how this’s supposed to go?’

‘You’d met her,’ Agnes said. ‘Iris told me. She called you a cowboy builder.’

‘According to you.’ He nodded as if humouring a slow child. ‘Makes sense you’d say anything to protect your dad, since he’s the one in custody.’

‘He’s not in custody,’ Ruth said flatly. ‘He’s helping the police with their enquiries.’

‘Oh, wake up! What d’you think that means? I bet Christie knows.’

His face grew dark. ‘He was doing okay, you know that? Until you got to work on him, putting whatever poison you’ve put in his head to get him spying and stealing from me. He’s a kid, for fuck’s sake. No way you’re making him give evidence in a police station, let alone a court. In any case he’s off the rails, it’s why you brought him all the way out here, isn’t it? To see if he could behave himself, give him a second chance. That turned out well.’

‘You care about Christie,’ Ruth said in her coldest voice. ‘I’m aware of that.’

‘Oh, you’d better not’ve dragged me all the way up here because you think I give a shit about anyone in this fucked-up family!’

Trevor snarled a laugh. ‘Because right now I’m thinking I need to get as far as possible from the lot of you.’

He turned the snarl on Agnes. ‘Your dad’s going down for this. Your brother, too.’

‘Adrian isn’t as pussy-whipped as you’d like to think.’ Ruth’s voice was frigid. ‘That’s the expression you taught Christie, isn’t it? How you encouraged him to think of his father. Well, if it’s how you see Adrian, you’re in for a shock. Because right now he’s telling the police what he saw at Blackthorn Ashes the night Iris Edison died. How you and he fought about what you were asking him to do, how he refused to help. How angry that made you.’

‘And he’s not fucking whipped?’ Trevor’s laugh was incredulous. ‘You controlling cunt.’

Agnes held her breath, seeing that night – Trevor killing Iris, his temper finally released from the cage he’d kept it in during the building of Blackthorn Ashes. Here on the cliff, she saw him frown, summoning the memory of everything he’d said to Adrian as they’d stood over Iris’s body, wondering in what ways he’d incriminated himself. Not many or he’d be more shaken at the prospect of Dad’s phone in the hands of the police.

Fear ran its rash across the back of her neck; Ruth was going to lose. Despite his temper, Trevor had himself well under control.

‘This doesn’t look much like a police station to me.’ He spread his hands. ‘More like a picnic spot. If you had any evidence, you’d have taken it to them. You’re pissing in the wind.’

He was right, there was no purpose to this standoff or none that Agnes could see. Ruth didn’t take risks but this was monstrously risky, for both of them. Who confronted a killer at the edge of a cliff? At best it was melodramatic. At worst . . .

The sea slapped the rocks, salt adding its tang to the fiery air.

Ruth was less than a foot away, holding her ground at Agnes’s side, shoulder to shoulder. Was that why she’d brought them here, to clear her debts in some way? It didn’t sound like Ruth but perhaps she’d wanted Agnes to witness her confronting Trevor with what he’d done, not just to Iris but to her. She hadn’t asked for Agnes’s forgiveness but this felt like atonement. Was that enough to explain the risks she was taking?

‘That’s it?’ Trevor dropped his hands to his sides then shrugged them into his pockets. ‘That’s all you got?’

Agnes thought of those hands on her, and on Iris.

Had he meant to kill her? Or had Iris opened the cage of his temper, pushing with her questions at the edges of his arrogance? Was there a moment when she realized what she’d done, the price she was about to pay?

‘You can keep your little souvenir, that tin you swiped. Should give the police a laugh, if nothing else.’

His face relaxed into its old lines, cocksure and confident. He wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice, by losing his temper when Ruth had nothing.

‘Waste their time just like you’ve wasted mine. See what good it does you . . . Are we done?’

Ruth’s silence was charged but it didn’t register with Trevor.

‘I’ll be going then.’ He shouldered past them, heading back down the path.

Agnes waited until she heard his car start, the spit of gravel against tyres.

‘What was that?’ she asked Ruth. ‘What were you trying to do?’

Anger found its way through her confusion. Her friend and her father were with the police, she should be at the station telling them about the scarf, clearing Errol’s name. Instead, she’d been dragged up here to witness a standoff that’d ended in deadlock.

‘Are you even going to tell the police about the tobacco tin?’

‘Perhaps.’ Ruth’s voice was distant and distracted. She was looking at her watch.

‘Well, I’m going to tell them about the scarf. The one Christie stole.’

Ruth looked at her. ‘No, you’re not.’

‘Errol is my friend.’

‘Christie is your brother.’ Those dragon’s eyes on her face. ‘Your blood.’

Agnes shivered, in spite of herself.

‘You were telling me about Emma Dearman—’

Her mother cut her off a second time. ‘We should get back to the caravan.’ She swept her hair from her eyes, glancing at the horizon as if she’d timed this whole thing to the slow slinking of the sun until all that was left was a thin red line on the water.