Every half an hour, once Emma’s out of the house, I find myself looking at the clock to check what time it is. I try and focus on the emails piling up in my inbox, but my brain is a mess; the guy with the farm wants me to change the way how I’ve organised his pictures for the fifth time. It’s getting to the point now if he asks me for one more change I’m going to tell him to sod off; then I will have my boss on the line, wanting to know what the hell’s going on.

At lunch I spend half an hour trying to find out more about Max. He’s got quite a big following on Facebook, around fifteen thousand followers; it actually says his podcast gets on average twenty thousand listeners a month. Twenty thousand, I try to imagine that number of people listening to me ramble on for an hour; the first thing anyone listening would think, well she’s miserable, and switch off. His Facebook page seems to be full of armchair detectives and conspiracy theorists, all discussing old crimes and their own theories about what might’ve happened in different cases. It makes me roll my eyes when I read some of the comments; but no one appears to be discussing what happened to my family though. At least that’s something.  

Four pm, at last, rolls round. My heart thuds as I click on the link Max sent me and wait for the call to connect. Come on Max, don’t leave me hanging. I tap my fingernail on the table. God Emma and Michael better not make this the day they come home early. I straighten up in my seat, as the call shows it’s connecting; Max’s face fills my screen, it looks like he’s sitting in his bedroom. He’s not how he looked in the photos I saw of him on his website. His dark hair’s bedraggled; glasses are balancing on his nose, sweat's shining on his forehead in the light. He looks at least ten years older than he did in the photo on his website. I notice a blue folder on his desk in front of him, and shiver when I spot my family’s name in bold printed on a label stuck to the cover. In the background, on his wall, there’s a Coldplay poster from one of their world tours. That would actually impress Callum; he’s a massive Coldplay fan. He dragged me along to one of their concerts once, I don’t mind a couple of their songs; I’m more of a fan of Billie Eilish and Imagine Dragons, it’s their music I listen to whenever I need to find an escape from everything happening around me.

‘Danielle, are you there?’ Max asks, leaning in closer to his screen. His glasses slip further down his nose.

I realise I haven’t switched my video on. ‘Oh, yeah, sorry, one sec.’

I click on the camera; my face appears on the screen.

‘Hi,’ Max says, smiling, sitting back. ‘Wow, it’s . . . it’s great to talk to you, you have no idea how much I’ve thought about you and your family over the years. You have no idea what some journalists would give for the chance to speak to you.’

I shift in my seat, God what he just said sounds really creepy; he has no personal connection to me at all, but he must feel he knows me personally, because of the countless stories he’s read about my family. ‘Um, yeah, it’s great to talk to you, I was actually listening to your podcast that you did a couple of years ago again last night, that’s why I contacted you,’ I say.

‘How did you manage to listen to the podcast? I was asked to take it down,’ he asks. There’s a slight hint of panic in his voice.

I frown. ‘I downloaded it at the time you uploaded it, why were you asked to take it down?’

It seems to take an age for him to reply. His eyes seem to dart around his room as he tries to think of what to say. What doesn’t he want to tell me? ‘Erm . . . OK I got a lot of emails from fans of my site asking why I’d taken the podcast down. I couldn’t reply to anyone I was . . .  I was threatened. I thought . . . I thought at the time it was going to be the end of the podcast, all that hard work built up over the years over in the blink of an eye.’

‘Threatened, I don’t understand, who threatened you?’ I ask. I can’t bloody get comfortable in my seat, I keep moving up and down.

He shakes his head, and rubs his hands together. ‘I honestly don’t know, although I have a theory. A couple of weeks after the podcast went live, I started receiving these . . . Erm . . . cease and desist letters in the post; they were threatening to come after everything. It made me think I’d accidentally stumbled across something incredible without realising. It made me really ill, I lost a load of weight, and I’m a heavy set guy so it really showed. I did have to think before replying to your email, but I couldn’t pass up on this opportunity.’

‘I did notice you’ve not discussed what happened to my family since that first podcast you did.’

Max rubs his eye. ‘Yeah, you hear of cases of people being threatened all the time, but you never think it’s going to happen to you. I’ve covered some big, well known cases since I set up my podcast, and I’ve never had anything like this happen to me before. So, why . . . why did you want to contact me?’

I keep thinking of what Callum would be saying to me if he knew what I was doing. Don’t think of what Callum would do. This is your choice. ‘I wanted to find out more about the other man who Harvey . . . my brother . . . murdered, Ian . . . you said in your podcast that you thought, if we found out what happened in the missing ten years of his life, it would bring us closer to finding out the truth. I also . . . I spoke to Harvey in prison a few weeks ago.’

Max stares at me, his mouth drops open. ‘You spoke to your brother.’  

I nod. Should I be telling him this? It doesn’t sound to me like he’s going to be writing up on our conversation. ‘I’ve been trying to speak to my brother since I was eighteen, but he’s always refused my request to see him, up until now.’

‘What did he say?’ Max asks, the pitch rising in his voice. At last, there’s the excitement I expected to hear from him.

‘He . . . he didn’t tell me why he killed them, he, he told me to go to this place, he says if I went there I would find out what happened, but, I did go there and still I don’t know the full story. Bits and pieces are starting to come together, but there are a lot of gaps missing.’

Max wipes his brow. ‘Jesus, I thought he was never gonna talk about what he did, he’s remained silent for twenty years. Well, I did do some digging into his life, Ian’s life; I was all set to do another podcast episode, I thought it was going to be my most popular podcast ever, but that’s when the letters started arriving.’

‘What did you find out?’ I ask. He’s glancing off to the left. It’s like he doesn’t want to tell me, like he’s still considering what might happen to him if he does. ‘Please, Max. This might help me.’

He sighs. ‘OK, I’ll tell you everything I found out.’