Holly’s lashes flickered. “I don’t remember.”

“Sweetie, I know you said you wouldn’t tell anyone. I heard you.”

A quick, wary flash of blue. “Heard what?”

“I’m going to bet it was just about everything.”

“Then if you heard, you tell that Stephen guy.”

“Won’t work, love. He needs to hear it direct from you.”

Her fists were starting to clench on the sides of her jumper. “So, tough. I can’t tell him.”

I said, “Holly. I need you to look at me.” After a moment her head turned, reluctantly, an inch or two in my direction. “Remember we talked about how, sometimes, you need to tell a secret because someone else has a right to know it?”

Shrug. “So?”

“So this is that kind of secret. Stephen’s trying to find out what happened to Rosie.” I left Kevin out of it: we were already several light-years beyond what the kid should have been coping with. “That’s his job. And to do it, he needs to hear your story.”

More elaborate shrug. “I don’t care.”

Just for a second, the stubborn tilt to her chin reminded me of Ma. I was fighting against every instinct she had, everything I had put into her bloodstream straight from my own veins. I said, “You need to care, sweetheart. Keeping secrets is important, but there are times when getting to the truth is even more important. When someone’s been killed, that’s almost always one of those times.”

“Good. Then Stephen Thingy can go bug somebody else and leave me alone, ’cause I don’t think Uncle Shay even did anything bad.”

I looked at her, tense and prickly and shooting off sparks like a wild kitten trapped in a corner. Just a few months earlier she could have done what I asked her to, unquestioning, and still kept her faith in lovely Uncle Shay intact. It seemed like every time I saw her the tightrope got thinner and the drop got longer, till it was inevitable that sooner or later I would get the balance wrong and miss my foothold just once, and take both of us down.

I said, keeping my voice even, “OK, kiddo. Then let me ask you something. You planned today pretty carefully, amn’t I right?”

That wary blue flash again. “No.”

“Come on, chickadee. I’m the wrong guy to mess with on this one. This is my job, planning this exact kind of stuff; I know when I see someone else doing it. Way back after you and me first talked about Rosie, you started thinking about that note you’d seen. So you asked me about her, nice and casually, and when you found out she’d been my girlfriend, you knew she had to be the one who’d written it. That’s when you started wondering why your uncle Shay would have a note from a dead girl stashed away in his drawer. Tell me if I’m going wrong here.”

No reaction. Boxing her in like a witness made me so tired I wanted to slide off my seat and go to sleep on the car floor. “So you worked on me till you got me to bring you over to your nana’s today. You left your maths homework till last, all weekend, so you could bring it along and use it to get your uncle Shay on his own. And then you went on at him till you got him talking about that note.”

Holly was biting down hard on the inside of her lip. I said, “I’m not giving out to you; you did a pretty impressive job of the whole thing. I’m just getting the facts straight.”

Shrug. “So what?”

“So here’s my question. If you didn’t think your uncle Shay had done anything wrong, then why did you go to all that hassle? Why not just tell me what you’d found, and let me talk to him about it?”

Down to her lap, almost too low to be intelligible: “Wasn’t any of your business.”

“But it was, honeybunch. And you knew it was. You knew Rosie was someone I cared about, you know I’m a detective, and you knew I was trying to find out what had happened to her. That makes that note very much my business. And it’s not like anyone had asked you to keep it a secret to begin with. So why didn’t you tell me, unless you knew there was something dodgy about it?”

Holly carefully unraveled a thread of red wool from her cardigan sleeve, stretched it between her fingers and examined it. For a second I thought she was going to answer, but instead she asked, “What was Rosie like?”

I said, “She was brave. She was stubborn. She was a laugh.” I wasn’t sure where we were going with this, but Holly was watching me sideways, intently, like it mattered. The dull yellow light from the street lamps turned her eyes darker and more complicated, harder to read. “She liked music, and adventures, and jewelry, and her friends. She had bigger plans than anyone else I knew. When she cared about something, she didn’t give up on it, no matter what. You would have liked her.”

“No I wouldn’t.”

“Believe it or not, chickadee, you would’ve. And she would have liked you.”

“Did you love her more than Mum?”

Ah. “No,” I said, and it came out so cleanly and simply that I was nowhere near sure it was a lie. “I loved her a different way. Not more. Just differently.”

Holly stared out the window, winding the bit of wool around her fingers and thinking her own intent thoughts. I didn’t interrupt. Up at the corner, a troop of kids barely older than her were pushing each other off a wall, snarling and chattering like monkeys. I caught the glow of a cigarette and the glint of cans.

Finally Holly said, in a tight, level little voice, “Did Uncle Shay kill Rosie?”

I said, “I don’t know. It’s not up to me to decide that, or to you. It’s up to a judge and a jury.”

I was trying to make her feel better, but her fists clenched and she hammered them down on her knees. “Daddy, no, that’s not what I mean, I don’t care what anyone decides! I mean really. Did he?”

I said, “Yeah. I’m pretty sure he did.”

Another silence, longer this time. The monkeys on the wall had switched to mashing crisps in each other’s faces and hooting encouragement. In the end Holly said, still in that tight small voice, “If I tell Stephen what me and Uncle Shay talked about.”

“Yeah?”

“Then what happens?”

I said, “I don’t know. We’ll have to wait and find out.”

“Will he go to jail?”

“He might. It depends.”

“On me?”

“Partly. Partly on a lot of other people, too.”

Her voice wavered, just a touch. “But he never did anything bad to me. He helps me with homework, and he showed me and Donna how to make shadows with our hands. He lets me have sips out of his coffee.”

“I know, sweetie. He’s been a good uncle to you, and that’s important. But he’s done other stuff, too.”

“I don’t want to make him go to jail.”

I tried to catch her eye. “Sweetheart, listen to me. No matter what happens, it won’t be your fault. Whatever Shay did, he did it himself. Not you.”

“He’ll still be mad. And Nana, and Donna, and Auntie Jackie. They’ll all hate me for telling.”

That wobble in her voice was getting wilder. I said, “They’ll be upset, yeah. And there’s a chance they might take that out on you for a bit, just at first. But even if they do, it’ll wear off. They’ll all know none of this is your fault, just like I do.”

“You don’t know for definite. They could hate me forever and ever. You can’t promise.”

Her eyes were white-ringed, hunted. I wished I had hit Shay a lot harder while I had the chance. “No,” I said. “I can’t.”

Holly slammed both feet into the back of the passenger seat. “I don’t want this! I want everyone to go away and leave me alone. I wish I never even saw that stupid note!”

Another slam that rocked the seat forward. She could have kicked my car to pieces for all I cared, if it made her feel any better, but she was going at it hard enough to hurt herself. I leaned around, fast, and got an arm between her feet and the seat back. She made a wild helpless noise and twisted furiously, trying to get a clear kick without hitting me, but I caught her ankles and held on. “I know, love. I know. I don’t want any of this either, but here it is. And I wish to God I could say that everything’ll be all right once you tell the truth, but I can’t. I can’t even promise that you’ll feel better; you might, but you could just as easily end up feeling even worse. All I can tell you is that you need to do it, either way. Some things in life aren’t optional.”