Dorothy nodded. ‘Well, we might have to widen the search times if we don’t find anything with Susan.’

‘Fine,’ Jacob said.

Hannah found a spot in the corner of a bookshelf, pushed the camera cube into the shadows, shifted the angle slightly until she was happy.

In the kitchen she placed one on the underside of the extraction fan hood above the cooker, then in the study she propped one up inside the grate of the unused fireplace. Upstairs she went into Jacob’s bedroom, another dowdy space with little light. She wondered about that for the clarity of pictures on the camera footage, but nothing could be done. There were sliding mirrored doors on a wardrobe, left open, and she placed the camera on a high shelf, obscured from below by a scarf.100

Out in the hall there weren’t many places to choose from, but she eventually settled on the top of the curtain pole across the window that looked over the green expanse of the Braids.

She looked around. This was a big house with five bedrooms, this floor on its own was bigger than her flat. Totally wasted on a single old man, but there you go. It was his home and his right to live wherever the hell he wanted.

She listened to Dorothy and Jacob’s voices drifting up the stairs. It reminded her of being a kid, hearing her mum and dad talk through the wall as she lay in bed cuddling a teddy. The security of that murmur, the realisation that they were there for her.

But of course they weren’t. Not really, in the end. They had split up and she had grown up, and everything changed. And here she was, spying on an old man’s carer to see if she was betraying him. She wondered about Peter and Mel and the email he mentioned. Maybe more betrayal. Then she slowly walked down the stairs, imagined herself back in time, her mum and dad together on their sofa downstairs, the world still comforting and reliable.

101

20

DOROTHY

Dorothy stared out of the window. Three teenagers were flipping a Frisbee to each other across the park, unnervingly accurate. Who has the time to get good at Frisbee? They wore clothes that looked like they were from the 1980s, mismatched, flammable primary colours and patterns. She had the phone pressed to her ear as she listened to the ring. She knew the address was on the shore at Newhaven and pictured a seascape, choppy waters all the way to Fife.

‘Hello, what do you want?’

The voice was working-class Edinburgh, impatient and tired. Dorothy heard kids’ television in the background. Lorna Daniels left the police to become a mum and never returned.

‘Hi, sorry to bother you.’

‘Are you?’