As Lillian was leaving, she paused at the front door, appearing to peer out at the sky—it had been threatening to rain.

“Do you have far to go? Did you want to borrow an umbrella?”

“Thank you dear, I’ll be fine. Just up the road.” But as she turned back, her face was serious. “I don’t want to worry you, but I thought I saw someone hanging around your trees earlier today. A man.”

“When was this?” Heather thought of the figure she thought she had seen the night before, when she’d been putting the bird out. She had half convinced herself she was imagining it, but perhaps …

“This afternoon. You haven’t left any spurned lovers behind, have you?”

Despite herself, Heather smiled at the archaic phrase. “Hardly. I’m sure I’ll be fine, Lillian. Thanks for dropping by.”

But she watched the old woman to the end of the path, and when she was gone, she stood for a time, looking at the darkness that surrounded the lawn. Could it be someone from the newspaper? There was at least one person there who would be keen to upset her, if not actively harm her. Eventually, the rain began to fall, the thick heavy rain of autumn, and she closed the door.

Later, Heather crashed on the bed in the spare room and opened her laptop. Waking up her phone, she popped off a quick message to Nikki, asking how she was and giving a swift rundown of her day at Belmarsh, and then she checked her emails. To her vague surprise, there was one there from whytewitch59, who apparently possessed the somewhat more prosaic name of Pamela Whittaker—she was happy to meet up for a chat, and wanted to know if this week would suit her? She emailed back, suggesting a time, wondering as she did so if she was setting herself up for an awkward half an hour of paranoid hippy nonsense.

Browsing a news site, she saw that DI Parker was right: news of a missing PE teacher in Lancashire had broken, and there was an appeal for information on the front page. Next to the headline was a photo of her, taken during some sort of school sports day, and that seemed to turn on some obscure light in the back of Heather’s head. She went out into the hallway and retrieved one of the boxes she’d brought down from the attic. This one contained a heap of loose photographs—photos that her mother had never gotten around to organizing or pressing into her many sets of leather-bound photo albums.

Taking it to the bed, she made herself comfortable and began to sift through the pictures. She knew which one she was looking for, and she knew it would be in the box. Her mother wouldn’t have put it in an album, she was sure of it.

Images of the past slipped across her lap; the older ones slightly grainy to the touch, the more recent glossy and cold. There were lots of photos of the parties her dad used to throw for his construction firm, filled with anonymous red-faced men drinking punch and looking worse for wear—in a few she caught sight of her dad, and these ones she paused to look at for a moment longer, her fingers lingering over his ruddy face. And then, there it was, nestling at the very bottom. The single photo of a summer fête she’d attended when she was about six years old.