“It’s stupid all right, but the sum’s the same either way. How many pieces of fruit each, then?”

The rhythmic scrape of a pencil-at that stage I could hear the tiniest sound coming from inside that flat, I could probably have heard the two of them blinking. Holly said, “What about Uncle Kevin?”

There was another fraction of a pause before Shay said, “What about him?”

“Did somebody kill him?”

Shay said, “Kevin,” and his voice was twisted into an extraordinary knot of things that I had never heard anywhere before. “No. No one killed Kevin.”

“For definite?”

“What’s your da say?”

That shrug again. “I told you. I didn’t ask him. He doesn’t like talking about Uncle Kevin. So I wanted to ask you.”

“Kevin. God.” Shay laughed, a harsh lost sound. “Maybe you’re old enough to understand this, I don’t know. Otherwise you’ll have to remember it till you are. Kevin was a child. He never grew up. Thirty-seven years old and he still figured everything in the world was going to go the way he thought it should; it never hit him that the world might work its own way, whether that suited him or not. So he went wandering around a derelict house in the dark, because he took it for granted he’d be grand, and instead he went out a window. End of story.”

I felt the wood of the banister crack and twist under my grip. The finality in his voice told me that was going to be his story for the rest of his life. Maybe he even believed it, although I doubted that. Maybe, left to his own devices, he would have believed it someday.

“What’s derelict?”

“Ruined. Falling to bits. Dangerous.”

Holly thought that over. She said, “He still shouldn’t have died.”

“No,” Shay said, but the heat had gone out of his voice; all of a sudden he just sounded exhausted. “He shouldn’t have. No one wanted him to.”

“But someone wanted Rosie to. Right?”

“Not even her. Sometimes things just happen.”

Holly said defiantly, “If my dad had married her, he wouldn’t have married my mum, and I wouldn’t have existed. I’m glad she died.”

The timer button on the hall light popped out with a noise like a shot-I didn’t even remember hitting it on my way up-and left me standing in empty blackness with my heart going ninety. In that moment, I realized that I had never told Holly who Rosie’s note had been addressed to. She had seen that note herself.

About a second later, I realized why, after all that adorable heartstringtugging stuff about hanging out with her cousins, she had brought along her maths homework today. She had needed a way to get Shay alone.

Holly had planned every step of this. She had walked into this house, gone straight to her birthright of steel-trap secrets and cunning lethal devices, laid her hand on it and claimed it for her own.

Blood tells, my father’s voice said flatly against my ear; and then, with a razor edge of amusement, So you think you’re a better da. Here I had been milking every self-righteous drop out of how Olivia and Jackie had screwed up; nothing either of them could have done differently, not at any lost moment along the way, would have saved us from this. This was all mine. I could have howled at the moon like a werewolf and bitten out my own wrists to get this out of my veins.

Shay said, “Don’t be saying that. She’s gone; forget her. Leave her rest in peace, and go on with your maths.”

The soft whisper of the pencil on paper. “Forty-two?”

“No. Go back to the start; you’re not concentrating.”

Holly said, “Uncle Shay?”

“Mmm?”

“This one time? When I was here and your phone rang and you went in the bedroom?”

I could hear her gearing up towards something big. So could Shay: the first beginnings of a wary edge were growing in his voice. “Yeah?”

“I broke my pencil and I couldn’t find my sharpener because Chloe took it in Art. I waited for ages, but you were on the phone.”

Shay said, very gently, “So what did you do?”

“I went and looked for another pencil. In that chest of drawers.”

A long silence, just a woman gabbling hysterically from the telly downstairs, muffled under all those thick walls and heavy carpets and high ceilings. Shay said, “And you found something.”

Holly said, almost inaudibly, “I’m sorry.”

I almost went straight through that door without bothering to open it. Two things kept me outside. The first one was that Holly was nine years old. She believed in fairies, she wasn’t sure about Santa; a few months back, she had told me that when she was little a flying horse used to take her for rides out her bedroom window. If her evidence was ever going to be a solid weapon-if, someday, I wanted someone else to believe her-I had to be able to back it up. I needed to hear it come out of Shay’s mouth.

The second thing was that there was no point, not now, in bursting in there with all guns blazing to save my little girl from the big bad man. I stared at the bright crack of light around the door and listened, like I was a million miles away or a million years too late. I knew exactly what Olivia would think, what any sane human being would think, and I stood still and left Holly to do my dirtiest work for me. I’ve done plenty of dodgy things in my time and none of them kept me awake at night, but that one is special. If there’s a hell, that moment in the dark hallway is what will take me there.

Shay said, like he was having a hard time breathing, “Did you say that to anyone?”

“No. I didn’t even know what it was, till just a couple of days ago I figured it out.”

“Holly. Love. Listen to me. Can you keep a secret?”

Holly said, with something that sounded horrifically like pride, “I saw it ages ago. Like months and months and months, and I never said anything.”

“That’s right, you didn’t. Good girl yourself.”

“See?”

“Yeah, I see. Now can you go on doing the same, can you? Keeping it to yourself?”

Silence.

Shay said, “Holly. If you tell anyone, what do you think will happen?”

“You’ll get in trouble.”

“Maybe. I’ve done nothing bad-d’you hear me?-but there’s plenty of people won’t believe that. I could go to jail. Do you want that?”

Holly’s voice was sinking, a subdued undertone aimed at the floor. “No.”

“I didn’t think so. Even if I don’t, what’ll happen? What do you think your da’s going to say?”

Uncertain flutter of a breath, little girl lost. “He’ll be mad?”

“He’ll be livid. At you and me both, for not telling him about it before. He’ll never let you back here; he’ll never let you see any of us again. Not your nana, not me, not Donna. And he’ll make dead sure your mammy and your auntie Jackie don’t find a way around him this time.” A few seconds, for that to sink in. “What else?”

“Nana. She’ll be upset.”

“Nana, and your aunties, and all your cousins. They’ll be in bits. No one will know what to think. Some of them won’t even believe you. There’ll be holy war.” Another impressive pause. “Holly, pet. Is that what you want?”

“No…”

“Course you don’t. You want to come back here every Sunday and have lovely afternoons with the rest of us, am I right? You want your nana making you a sponge cake for your birthday, just like she did for Louise, and Darren teaching you the guitar once your hands get big enough.” The words moved over her, soft and seductive, wrapping around her and pulling her in close. “You want all of us here together. Going for walks. Making the dinner. Having laughs. Don’t you?”

“Yeah. Like a proper family.”

“That’s right. And proper families look after each other. That’s what they’re for.”

Holly, like a good little Mackey, did what came naturally. She said, and it was still just a flicker of sound but with a new kind of certainty starting somewhere underneath, “I won’t tell anyone.”

“Not even your da?”

“Yeah. Not even.”

“Good girl,” Shay said, so gently and soothingly that the dark in front of me went seething red. “Good girl. You’re my best little niece, aren’t you?”