The airbrakes sighed. Lou zipped up her parka and stepped from the bus. With the cold biting her cheeks, she turned in to the very last street on the farthest edge of the estate. The snow had a strange, calming effect, muffling the roar of traffic coming from the M1 just beyond the houses. It settled on parked cars and filled potholes in the road. Fairy lights shone out from windows, and lights shaped like icicles that had been nailed to porches and fences, blinked and rattled in the wind. In one garden, a huge inflated Homer Simpson dressed as Santa Claus, bobbed and weaved on a rope tethering him to the ground. And, rising above the rooftops, the spire of St Mary’s was just visible, its weathervane creaking as it spun.

Lou stopped at the gate of the only house not decorated for Christmas and looked up at the dark windows. A shout came from the direction of the green, and a car revved its engine. She fumbled in her pocket, ran up the path, dropped her keys, stooped to pick them up. Her hands shook so violently, it took three attempts to force the key into the lock. Once inside, she slammed the door and leant against the wall. Danger seemed to lurk in every turn on this estate now. She no longer knew how to be in this place where once she had felt so safe, whose alleys and streets she had run and cycled along as a child. She hated it; hated how someone out there had made her feel. Vulnerable, trapped.

When her pulse settled, she switched on the hall light. Everything looked as it always had; coats draped over the banister and hung on the hooks beside the door; shoes and trainers piled up at the bottom of the stairs; Dean’s rugby boots upturned, each stud encased in a crust of dried mud and twisted grass. But a glance along the hooks revealed that one coat was missing. And a pair of fleece-trimmed boots was absent from the pile of shoes. They were the boots and coat the police had kept as evidence.

‘Dean! Are you in?’ Lou called, her voice more desperate than she would have liked. ‘Dean!’ she tried again. ‘Bring your sports kit down, I’ll put it through the wash.’

A door opened upstairs, and the stairs creaked as Dean lumbered down. ‘How was college?’ Lou asked.

Dean shrugged and grabbed his coat from the banister without a single glance in her direction.

‘Where’s Stephen?’ Lou said.

‘Where do you think?’

The pub. It was always the pub. Even before the events of the last few weeks, Stephen had been as much a fixture of The Hill House Arms as the collection of horse brasses behind the bar.

‘What about your tea? I’ll make you something. Sausages?’ It was a pathetic attempt to delay his departure, and she knew it. She wasn’t even sure there was anything in the freezer, except an empty ice cube tray.