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in Spain, where they spent at least half of every year.
    ‘I can’t think of anyone,’ I told the sergeant.
    ‘There must be someone,’ he said.
    ‘I know there must,’ I said. ‘I just can’t think of anyone.’
    ‘We’ll have to appoint someone for you then,’ he said.
    ‘Who?’
    ‘There are a couple of people on call,’ he said. ‘Social workers. We’ll get one to come in.’
    ‘A social worker?’ I didn’t like the sound of it. Social workers dealt with neglected kids from council estates, not nice middle-class people like me.
    ‘Unless you can come up with someone else for us.’
    I racked my brains, but no one came to mind.
    ‘We’ll find someone suitable,’ he said. ‘Meanwhile you’ll have to wait out there.’ It was a sign to my keeper that the session was over. She led me back out into the corridor and along to another room.
    A juvenile detention room, it was called. To me, when PC Courtney had gone and locked the door behind her, it felt like a cell. It felt like prison.
    There was nothing in the room except a table and a couple of hard plastic chairs. Sounds from other parts of the building echoed indistinctly through the bare walls. I hated the place but I realized that it was a relief to be alone; to have a chance for the first time that dreadful morning to think. I sat down on a chair and sprawled across the table. My head felt heavy and I rested it on my arms. I wanted to sleep, but I knew it would be a long, long time before I could expect to get that kind of release.

12
    T HEY SAY THAT EVERY cloud has a silver lining, but I never knew what that meant until Alex got beaten up on the way home from school.
    Mum was at home again for a couple of weeks that September because the summer season had ended and there was a break before the team embarked on the first of that year’s winter tours. Dad was practically invisible, working frenetically on the squirrel genomes, living in the stuffy study during daylight hours, emerging only for coffee or the odd weekend cricket match. Alex and I were about three weeks into the term, when he came home black and blue.
    Normally we cycled together, but that day his class had been on a trip to an archaeological dig so he’d come home late, on his own. At first he insisted that he had come off his bike. Mum didn’t believe it. She wasn’t exactly a forensics expert but she did know a lot about injuries and she was as sure as she could be that Alex’s hadn’t come from a fall. Eventually he admitted that he’d been in a fight, but he said he didn’t know the boys who had done it. He said they had jumped him from the side of the road when he was taking the short cut through the back streets. But he refused to tell anyone exactly where it had happened and he wouldn’t let Dad call the police. He stayed at home for a couple of days hoping that the bruises would disappear, but of course they just got blacker. On the third day he came down to breakfast with the local newspaper under his arm.
    ‘I want to learn martial arts,’ he said.
    ‘What, karate and stuff?’ I said.
    ‘Sounds like a good idea,’ said Mum. Alex wasn’t all that short but he was as skinny as a whippet and I knew Mum worried about him. She was always trying to feed him, a tactic which backfired consistently because of Alex’s contrary temperament.
    ‘Not karate,’ he said. ‘Aikido.’ He showed us a newspaper ad in the paper. The classes were on Saturday mornings at a hall on our side of the town. A new beginners’ session was due to start that week.
    ‘Go for it,’ said Dad. ‘Even if you never need to use it you can’t go wrong with that kind of thing. It’ll give you great confidence.’
    It gave Alex a lot more than that. The aikido class led to him meeting the best friend he had made in his life so far. Javed Malik was the silver lining to that dark cloud. They were the same age and roughly the same height and weight, which is why they were put together as