‘Yes, there is that discrepancy,’ Pip said. ‘But that can happen with small details in eyewitness accounts.’

Joanna’s eyes were alight now, burning a path across Pip’s face. ‘Yes, and our instinct was to believe the two who saw him in the shirt, because that’s what we presumed Jamie was wearing. But what if it’s the other two who are right, the ones who saw him in a black hoodie? Jamie has a black hoodie,’ she said, ‘one with a zip. He wears it all the time. If it was undone, maybe from the front you wouldn’t see much of it and would focus on the shirt beneath.’

‘But he wasn’t wearing a black hoodie when he left the house on Friday,’ Pip said, looking to Connor. ‘And he wasn’t carrying it with him, didn’t have a rucksack or anything.’

‘No, he definitely didn’t have it on him,’ Connor stepped in. ‘That’s what I said at first. But . . .’ He gestured back to his mum.

‘But –’ Joanna picked it up – ‘I’ve looked everywhere. Everywhere. In his wardrobe, his drawers, all these piles of clothes, his laundry basket, the ironing pile, the cupboards in our room, Connor’s and Zoe’s. Jamie’s black hoodie isn’t here. It’s not in the house.’

Pip’s breath stalled in her chest. ‘It’s not here?’

‘We’ve, like, triple-checked everywhere it could be,’ said Connor. ‘Spent the last few hours searching. It’s gone.’

‘So, if they’re right,’ Joanna said, ‘if those two eyewitnesses are right, and they saw Jamie wearing a black hoodie, then . . .’

‘Then Jamie came back home,’ Pip said, and she felt a cold shiver, wandering the wrong way past her stomach, filling the hollows of her legs. ‘Between the calamity party and the sighting on Wyvil Road, Jamie came back home. Back here,’ she said, looking around the room with new eyes: the hectic piles of clothes strewn about, maybe when Jamie had been frantically searching for the hoodie. The smashed mug by his bed, maybe that happened by accident, in his haste. The missing knife downstairs. Maybe, if Jamie was the one who took it, maybe that’s the real reason he returned home.

‘Yes, exactly,’ Joanna said. ‘That’s what I was thinking. Jamie came home.’ She said it with such hope in her voice, such undisguised wanting, her little boy back home, like the part that came after couldn’t ever take that away from her; that he’d then left again and disappeared.

‘So if he did come back and take his hoodie,’ Pip said, avoiding any mention of the missing knife, ‘it must have been between, say, 10:45 p.m., after walking back from Highmoor, and 11:25ish, because it would’ve taken at least fifteen minutes to get halfway down Wyvil.’

Joanna nodded, hanging on her every word.

‘But . . .’ Pip stopped herself, and restarted, directing the question at Connor. It was easier that way. ‘But didn’t your dad get home from the pub around 11:15?’

Joanna answered anyway. ‘Yes, he did. About then. Obviously, Arthur didn’t see Jamie at all, so Jamie must have come and gone before Arthur got back.’

‘Have you asked him about that?’ Pip said tentatively.

‘Asked him what?’

‘About his movements that night?’

‘Yes, of course,’ Joanna said bluntly. ‘He got back from the pub around 11:15, as you said. No sign of Jamie.’

‘So, Jamie must have come back earlier, right?’ Connor asked.

‘Right,’ Pip said, but that’s not what she was thinking at all. She was thinking that Tom Nowak said he saw Jamie going into Nat da Silva’s house on Cross Lane at 10:50 p.m. And was there time to do both? Visit Nat, walk home and leave again? No, not really, not without Jamie’s time window overlapping with Arthur’s. But Arthur said he was home at 11:15 and hadn’t seen Jamie. Something wasn’t adding up here.

Either Jamie didn’t go to Nat’s at all, came home earlier and left before 11:15 when his dad got home. Or Jamie did go to Nat’s, briefly, then walked home, coinciding with the time his dad was back and Arthur just hadn’t noticed Jamie was there, or when he left. Or Arthur did notice, and for some reason he was lying about it.

‘Pip?’ Joanna repeated.

‘Sorry, what was that?’ Pip said, out of her head and back inside the room.

‘I said, when I was looking for Jamie’s black hoodie, I found something else.’ Joanna’s eyes darkened as she approached Jamie’s white laundry basket. ‘I looked through here,’ she said, opening the lid and retrieving an item of clothing from the top. ‘And this was about halfway down.’

She held it up by the seams on the shoulders to show Pip. It was a grey cotton jumper. And down the front, about five inches below the collar, were drops of blood, dried to a reddish brown. Seven stains in all, each one smaller than a centimetre. And a long smear of blood on the cuff of one sleeve.

‘Shit.’ Pip stepped forward to get a better look at the blood.

‘This is the jumper he wore on his birthday,’ Joanna said, and indeed Pip recognized it from the missing posters all over town.

‘You heard him sneak out late that night, didn’t you?’ Pip asked Connor.

‘Yeah.’

‘And he didn’t accidentally hurt himself at home that evening?’

Joanna shook her head. ‘He went into his bedroom and he was fine. Happy.’

‘These look like the blood dripped from above, it’s not spatter,’ Pip said, circling her finger in front of the jumper. ‘The sleeve looks like it was wiped against a source of blood.’

‘Jamie’s blood?’ The colour had gone from Joanna’s face, drained away to somewhere unseen.

‘Possibly. Did you notice if he had any cuts or bruises the next day?’

‘No,’ Joanna said quietly. ‘Nowhere I could see.’

‘It could be someone else’s blood,’ Pip thought aloud and immediately regretted it. Joanna’s face folded, collapsing in on itself as a lone tear escaped and twisted around the contours of her cheeks.

‘I’m sorry, Joanna,’ Pip said. ‘I shouldn’t have s—’

‘No, it’s not you,’ Joanna cried, carefully placing the jumper back on top of the basket. Two more tears broke free, racing each other to her chin. ‘It’s just this feeling, like I don’t even know my son at all.’

Connor went to his mum, folded her into a hug. She had shrunk again, and she disappeared inside his arms, sobbing into his chest. An awful, raw sound that hurt Pip just to hear it.

‘It’s OK, Mum,’ Connor whispered down into her hair, looking to Pip, but she also didn’t know what to say to make anything better.

Joanna re-emerged with a sniff, wiping at her eyes in vain. ‘I’m not sure I recognize him.’ She stared down at Jamie’s jumper. ‘Trying to steal from your mum, getting fired and lying to us for weeks. Breaking into someone’s home in the middle of the night to steal a watch he didn’t need. Sneaking out. Coming back possibly with someone’s blood on his clothes. I don’t recognize this Jamie,’ she said, closing her eyes like she could imagine her son back in front of her, the one she knew. ‘This isn’t him, these things he’s done. He’s not this person; he’s sweet, he’s considerate. He makes me tea when I get in from work, he asks me how my day went. We talk, about how he’s feeling, how I’m feeling. We’re a team, me and him, we have been since he was born. I know everything about him – except clearly I don’t any more.’