Although Dad has never really warmed to Chester – it’s nothing personal, he says, he’s just not really a dog person – I couldn’t help it. A week or so after we’d got him I realised it was pointless blaming an accident I’d caused on a dog who hadn’t even been born when it happened. Also, he had this way of following us around with his head low and a worried look in eyes, as if apologising for wanting to be with us, which was both pathetic and impossible to ignore. I took him out running beside my bike. He loved that immediately and still does, keeps up effortlessly and has an amazing knack of staying dead close without getting in the way. So Mum was right, he did cheer me up, I suppose. What really made me want to take care of him properly though was when I heard how he’d ended up in that home. His previous owners were done for neglect. They’d left Chester and their two other dogs in the back of a car while they went to the cinema. In the daytime. In June. They’d opened the windows a crack and parked in the shade, but – surprise – the sun moved. The dogs got overheated and the other two died. Chester only just survived.

Locked in that container, I couldn’t get his ordeal out of my mind, for obvious reasons. Amelia kept asking Marcel if he knew what was happening, but he clearly knew no more than us, and the meditative trance he’d decided to go into didn’t reassure me much. He sat fixed as a tree stump, the occasional bead of sweat dripping from his nose.

I called Langdon again and left a message this time, trying to convey the seriousness of the situation but keep the panic from my voice so as not to alarm Amelia. Then, for want of anything else to do, I put my eye to the best peephole and left it there. Nothing had changed about the scene, and nothing much did. It got marginally worse at one point when a flatbed truck carrying concrete tubes parked up near the Portakabin thing, blocking out the grey scree. I was passing the time counting the concrete tubes when something beneath the truck, or on the other side of it, rather, made me switch eyes: a flicker of lime green, jerking along beneath some legs, supporting a person I couldn’t see because of the damned truck, moving from left to right. I whipped out my camera and zoomed in as far as the telephoto lens would go.

‘Really? You’re still thinking about your photo-journalism thing? Now?’ said Amelia.

‘I can’t believe it. That has to be him,’ I said, and banged on the wall of the container as hard as I could with my free hand.