Alice's father makes me take him to the cottage and then he makes me go back with Alice to their house and wait in their living room, which is nice and pretty and very, very clean. Alice won't speak to me. Which is fine. I don't want to speak to anyone. She sits very far back on the sofa with her arms folded, and she only moves when the police car turns up outside. There is a police officer. He is talking to her father. She goes to the window and then she turns to me.

What's happening? she says. And she doesn't sound anything like herself. She doesn't sound sure or certain or mean-but-not-really-mean. She just sounds kind of puzzled. I don't answer her. I am sitting very still, and thinking about Mum. The sick on her and the axe and the messed up cottage, and I didn't clean the sick off her. Not even in the morning before I came to get Alice's father, and they're going to see that. Everyone's going to see that. I don't want to speak to anyone ever again.