It was a coincidence, surely?

The double scars, like an equals sign.

It could not be.

I just saw his arm quickly, I tell myself. Surely I am deluded? The stress, the fire, my mam, everything…I cannot be thinking straight.

I am in a police car with a blanket round me, people talking above my head into radios and telephones, a blue light flashing in the rearview mirror, and a lady with too much perfume sitting next to me, patting my arm (which is somewhat annoying).

But when everything and everybody one knows and loves is destroyed in a single night, it can affect one’s judgment.

One’s judgment? Your judgment. You see, I do not even speak like you, although I try. I am trying very, very hard.

OK?

(Mam and I listened to the wireless, although the people on the wireless do not usually speak the same way people around here do. I try to talk like them, but I get it wrong: I can hear it myself, and I can tell when I talk to other people—which is not often—that they sometimes think I speak oddly.)

As if from a distance, there is a voice in the car: “…Alfie? You OK, Alfie?”

It gets louder.

“Alfie!”

I turn; it is not loud at all. It is just the lady next to me on the backseat of the car, and she is patting my hand even more forcefully. I would like to move my arm out of her way, but that would seem rude, so I endure it for a little longer before saying, “Please stop that.”

She looks at her hand, startled, and then withdraws it.

Was that rude? I said “please.”

“We’re going to take you somewhere safe, Alfie,” she is saying. “You can get cleaned up, and we’ll get you something to eat. I bet you’re hungry, love?”

I say nothing. I am not hungry at all. Before betraying me this morning, Roxy had brought me bread rolls, cheese, two apples, a banana, and a chicken leg in foil. I had eaten it all, like a condemned man’s last meal.

Then the little girl (Liberty? Something like that) had done their dirty work for them.

I was on my own in the shed, the one that Roxy calls her garage, which I think is quite funny. She is a clever girl. Mam would call her wordsnoterlic (said like “ward-snotter-lick”). It means wise and sharp.

Aidan? Flarath, she would have said. Traitor. I begged them both to say nothing. They told Aidan’s sister. She told everybody.

Now I sit in a police car with a blanket and a lady called Sangeeta who is a Child Protection Officer, whatever that may be. She said she was working with the police to ensure my safety.

This is what she says in a breathy, singsong voice, as though I were six or something.

“Hello, Alfie? My name’s Sangeeta. I’m a designated Child Protection Officer working with Northumbria Police. I’ve been assigned to you to ensure your safety. Do I have your permission for physical contact?”

She speaks like this a lot, I think. It is as though she has memorized phrases like the actors in plays that Mam and I liked.

Frankly, I am not really listening. My mind keeps going back to the man in Aidan’s kitchen.

The double scars. A coincidence, surely, I tell myself again.

I wonder what Mam would have said. A lady in jeans and sandals protecting me, Alve Einarsson, who once protected Mam from a bear by shouting at it, although that was a long, long time ago when things were different from now. (For a start, there were bears. Well, at least one.)

Everything around me brings every thought back to Mam, and I feel a tear roll down my cheek. Sangeeta sees this and starts to pat my arm again, but I look at her hand and she stops.

Can we please get going? There is nobody in the driver’s seat. Come on, you have found me now. What is the delay?

Here is what happened.

I was in the garage when I heard someone approaching. I had assumed it was Roxy coming back, or Aidan, so I did not bother to conceal myself. That was my mistake. I should have known better. The door opened and Libby (that is her name, I recall now) stood there, staring at me.

A little girl, maybe seven, eight years old. I knew immediately that I had been betrayed: no one would come looking for me unless they knew I was there.

So I left everything and started to run into the woods. I know those woods better than anyone. I could easily hide myself for a while if anybody came looking; then I would make my way back to the garage and restart the plan devised by Mam and me.

Ludicrous. Unworkable. A fantasy. I know—but I was desperate.

There is a hollow on the north side of the woods: a depression beneath a fallen tree that is overgrown with gorse and spiky juniper and impossible to see just by walking past.

I should have known when I heard the helicopter thudding in the sky that I would not be allowed to escape quietly and get on with my life, our plan.

I heard the voices first, then the footsteps coming nearer. I shuffled a little deeper into my crevice. There was something else, though.

A dog.

The police dog found me in the ditch. It was sniffing furiously, then whining. I had left a T-shirt in the garage. They must have allowed the dog to sniff it, then “game over,” as I think you say. I should have expected it, I suppose.

“Come on, son,” said the dog’s handler, a policeman in a bright yellow jacket. He held his hand out for me. “Mind the thorns.”

I thought about running, but what was the point?

I would simply endure what was to come. It could not have been as bad as I was imagining.

How wrong I was there. As the driver got into the car and reversed out of the space, a journey started that was to get worse than I could possibly have dreamed.

First, though, I have to answer the question that has been scuttling around in my head like a cockroach:

Do I tell the truth?