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lingered there for a moment before looking back at his face. He felt as if she had stripped him bare. Her long brown hair had no grey in it and bounced on her shoulders as she receded down the corridor, her small frame accentuated by the baggy white trousers and top that she wore.
    Inside that head was his sister, crying out to be found.
    The man stopped at the door at the far end of the corridor and opened it using another key from a bunch in his pocket. Olivia was thirty feet away now, standing still, just looking at Darren as a cat might wait under a bird’s nest for the chicks. A moment later they had passed through and he was alone again.
    Darren had never seen Olivia in the flesh; he had not been at the trial. He had only seen the newspaper picture of her taken in the police station, after she had been hit by someone or something in the side of the head and it had developed a large swelling that distorted one of her eyes and accentuated the bags under them. She had looked how people would have wanted to see her – mad, deranged, and violent, her horrid work finally at an end. He had lived with that picture of her in his head for ten years. Only that image had been a lie. He had been lied to, and he didn’t like it. One of the many thoughts that were roiling round inside him was that Olivia Duvall was … normal-looking. Almost pretty.
    Sonny watched the young cleaner collapse against the wall. ‘Bwoy look like he gonna faint.’
    ‘Seeing that kiddie-killer will do that for you no bother,’ Corey said. Sonny shook his head in disapproval. Corey had a tabloid take on the world even though he never read a newspaper. ‘It’s not healthy, having normal people in here mixing with these nutters,’ he went on.
    Sonny sighed. ‘Someone’s got to do it though. Might as well be the young. Maybe they can recover quicker.’
     
    Darren had been parked with his nana during the court case; he was deemed too young to understand the details, to see the monster herself. One day Dad came home from the trial early – they found out later that he had begun shouting in court and had had to be dismissed. He came through the front door, a tension in him so great he walked like a man Darren didn’t recognise. Darren and Nan followed him into the living room where he began to grab his records off the shelves, his prized collection of thirty years, and pull them from their sleeves, snap them against his knees, hurl them at the walls and smash them on the floor.
    His mum and dad used to dance before Carly died; they never danced after. It was in this room that Dad and Carly would fight over music. Dad would put on a tune and would wiggle his hips and click his fingers, jiving like he was at Studio 54, while Carly would bounce, high and far, arms out and knees high-kicking, the hip hop rhythm pulsing through her whatever the track. She always existed, to Darren, in a physical way: spinning on a gymnastic high beam, rolling over cracked and uneven paving on her skateboard, crouched low on her surfboard, prancing about in this room, her long hair flying to the ceiling.
    As they cued up the records and shouted out suggestions for tracks the two of them would get madder, freer, the volume control would turn and turn, their dancing becoming more and more frenetic, until it was loud enough to make Mary from next door barrel down her path and up theirs, her housecoat flapping. Dad would hold up a hand in apology and, when she was gone, give his low chuckle and turn the volume back down, boogieing down the corridor to the kitchen for a vodka and tonic.
    But the sounds in the living room on that afternoon were not like the whoops of joy brought on by dancing with his daughter; they came from the pain of listening to what was being described in court. He and Nan could only watch until Dad was done destroying something he had loved doing, because without Carly it was too painful to ever repeat. When he had destroyed every single record, he