In minutes Heather had a cup of coffee and a plate of crushed avocado on toast, her laptop set up at a small table and her browser open. Very quickly she found Fiddler’s Folly on Google maps, although now it was called The Heron Look and it was owned by the same environmental charity that partly owned the Fiddler’s Mill spa. That was interesting, but as far as Heather could tell the building was still standing empty, and she could find no information about whether it was now used as a hotel, storage, or some sort of headquarters for the charity. Looking a little deeper, she found a number of references to the “rumors” the old man Bert had mentioned, although they were all annoyingly vague. The family that had built it had dwindled and died off, but she got the impression they weren’t thought of with any affection by the locals.

Eventually, she gave up on Fiddler’s Folly—she now knew, at least, where exactly the photo of her mother and Michael Reave had been taken—and began looking up Polaroid websites. Through these, she discovered that it was possible to figure out the rough date the Polaroid film had been manufactured, if not the date the photo had been taken. A long string of numbers on the back, very faded and almost impossible to read, revealed that the Polaroid film had been made in April 1982, which certainly fitted with the date scribbled in black ink. According to the website, back then instant film had been very expensive, and many families with Polaroid cameras would save their shots for important occasions. Feeling the coffee turn to a sour slick in her stomach, she imagined someone—possibly Michael Reave—buying the film, perhaps smiling over all the “special” moments he would capture with it.

She looked at the photo, which was lying next to her on the table. There must, she reasoned, be thousands like it—quick snaps of couples on beaches, their arms around each other. Very few, she suspected, would have such a dark history surrounding them.

She retrieved the photographs of the babies she’d found in the caravan from her bag, keeping them face down and on her lap, for reasons she couldn’t quite explain. It didn’t take long to figure out that, yes, these photos were from the same film run that had produced the photo of Reave and her mother. The film was produced on the same day in the same year, according to the codes on the back. It even told her on which shift the film was made.

Thinking of photographs, she remembered the one she had given to Ben Parker, of the fete and the red-headed girl who would grow up to be a PE teacher. Parker had said Fiona was there to pick up a certificate for some sort of nature scheme—on a whim, she put Young Nature Walkers Prize into the search engine. The scheme had ended some twenty years ago, but there were still a few remnants of it left online; someone had put the bare bones of a Wikipedia page together for it, logging the sorts of activities the children had to complete to get their certificate, things like rambling, pressing flowers, making a corn dolly. The scheme had been sponsored by Oak Leaf, the same environmental charity that had a hand in the very spa she was sitting in.