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‘Come up any time you want to work on it. You know where the key is.’

‘Cheers.’

‘Get home safe now!’ Ronnie and Dougie had a final laugh at his expense and then went inside and whistled for the dog.

Steven waited until everyone was asleep. Just after midnight he dressed quietly, took the torch from under the kitchen sink where his mother kept it for when the electric went out, and walked back through the silent village to Ronnie Trewell’s house.

The garage key was where Ronnie had told him it would be; the up-and-over door opened with barely a squeak, and the trailer rolled easily out on to the driveway.

So far, so good, thought Steven, as he closed the door and put the key back in the hanging basket that contained a bouquet of dead weeds.

The trailer was made of aluminium and was well balanced on properly inflated tyres, so Steven made good time down into the village, towing it behind him. But he’d hardly gone fifty yards up the hill towards Em’s house before he started to sweat and his hands to hurt from gripping the awkward metal so hard. He swung the trailer sideways so that it wouldn’t roll back down the hill, and stopped.

He had never considered that he might not be able to tow the trailer all the way to where it belonged. Now, if he couldn’t, he had blown it. If he couldn’t get it up this hill, he would be unlikely to get it back up the similar hill to Ronnie’s house. He couldn’t just leave it on the street. Anyone might hitch it up and tow it away and then it really would be stolen, instead of just ‘borrowed’.

Stopping and thinking had allowed Steven to get his breath back, and so he tugged the trailer another twenty yards before halting again, his hands burning. He was fit but slim – not a bulky young farmer like the boys who inhabited the YFC discos he had been to once or twice. The hill was long and unrelentingly steep, and the road was broken up in places that he knew from dodging them on his skateboard by day, but which he couldn’t see by night, making the trailer bump and lurch now and then. But Steven Lamb was not a boy who gave up easily. He’d been through more in his seventeen years than most people had in a lifetime, and that was a well of experience he often drew from when faced with a difficult situation. Sometimes he thought that was all he really had – this determination. Other boys were great at soccer or cross-country running or chatting up girls. Steven was just plain dogged. He hated to give up. It wasn’t a spectacular talent, but it was better than nothing.

So he turned the trailer so that he could push rather than pull it, and found that was better – he could get his weight behind it. Even so, it was only another fifty yards before he had to stop again, wiping sweat from his forehead with his arm.

He hoped no cars came up or down the hill. The trailer had no lights and he was in jeans and his black school jumper. He wanted to return the trailer, but he didn’t want to get squashed doing it. Plus, if he were run over and killed right now, nobody would know he’d been returning the trailer. Everyone would think he’d been the one who’d stolen it in the first place. He’d die a thief, and that would be seriously unfair.

Spurred by that thought, Steven put his back into it once more.

The lane suddenly brightened, and he realized a security light on the eaves of Honeysuckle Cottage had picked up his movement.

Feeling horribly visible, Steven pushed on. He hadn’t been up here at night for a long time. Well over a year. The last time had been in the snow, with his newspaper bag on his hip. He didn’t want to remember that night – not now, while he needed to keep going on past Rose Cottage.

The memories crowded in anyway.

The night Mrs Holly had been murdered.

She’d made him tea; she’d given him money. She’d hugged him so fiercely that she’d squeezed tears from his eyes on to her blue shoulder.

And he’d given her nothing. For all the time they’d spent together – for all the interest she’d shown, and all the quiet little moments of kindness, he’d given nothing back. Not even when she needed him most.

A hundred times since that night, Steven had been burned by the shame of cowardice. It made him feel weak and unworthy of love.

Come with me.

That’s what he could have said. Should have said. It would have been so simple.

But come with me where? He was just the paperboy and Lucy Holly was a real adult with a proper life, who was used to making grown-up decisions, despite her weak legs and her crutches. Something had told him that she would not consider that battling through a blizzard on the arm of a boy to his mum’s house in the middle of the night was a sensible decision. Even he had known it would have sounded a bit nuts. Asking her if she needed help would have meant acknowledging the danger she was in, and he’d had no idea how to speak to her about that.

So instead he’d left her there to die.

The thought sent a chill through Steven.