88. Now

The door handle came off. Tristan keeps hurling himself at it, but it only opens in and the whole frame is starting to splinter.

I check my watch: seven forty. Would my parents have called the police? Would they have dared?

What if Jenna and Rose are dead, but Tristan is pretending they're alive to use them as leverage?

We should have made him let us speak to them, hear their voices.

The door-frame gives a loud crack and Tristan growls like a dog and keeps going.

I look at the spools of brown tape tangled across the floor. Light doesn't destroy VCR tape, does it? And Georgia will have copies, digital copies in a million places, and he'll never get them.

He knows that, doesn't he?

I watch as he runs for the hundredth time towards the door, one shoulder forward. He's thrown himself so hard, so many times, he must've broken something.

He knows it's all over. He knows there's no more hiding.

And then I see in a flash the moments that have been locked away for so long, the moments that I can only keep at bay with the sharp, high pain of a knife.

I freeze in the corridor outside Miss Smith's class, certain I hear footsteps, then hurry on and push through, my hot fingers on the brass plate.

And there she is, lying on the floor before her desk, swollen and raw. He didn't push her, causing her to fall and knock her head, like he'd said. It wasn't a split-second act of self-defence that went sideways. Her eyes are hidden behind purple pouches. Handprints round her throat stand out like they've been pressed on with red paint.

He beat her and kept going. He kept going until he thought she was dead.