Bex, Jai and I sat on the dusty ground and watched the firefighters putting out the last of the blaze. Kirsty had been taken away in an ambulance, Frankie with her. Some of the pigs had survived, and Tony Nightingale had come over and was moving them into another barn. I’d offered to help but he said he’d prefer to do it alone, that he could cope better with his daughter being injured if he kept busy. He was setting up metal hurdles to define a path for the pigs to follow. Lots were dead. I didn’t want to see.

My phone rang. Fiona. ‘We’ve traced the approximate location of the phone Daniel called you from. Units are heading there now.’ I allowed myself to hope that we might find Daniel and that he’d have Violet. That Violet and Daniel would both be okay, even if Daniel wasn’t really okay at all.

Bex looked down at her hands. The ends of her fingers were red raw from scraping at the barn wall.

‘You need to get those seen to,’ I said. ‘And get yourself checked for smoke inhalation.’

Bex blinked as if confused. ‘Oh. Yes. I will. They said another ambulance is on the way. Dad’s going to come with me in that one, so he can see Kirsty too. Did you see what happened to her?’

‘A chunk of corrugated metal roof fell on her legs,’ Jai said, not very subtly.

I felt a spark of concern for Kirsty, but mainly because she might be the only person who could lead us to Daniel and Violet, and now we couldn’t talk to her.

‘It’s Gritton,’ Bex said. ‘Bad things happen.’

I pictured her in her cluttered kitchen, surrounded by her saxophone-playing china dogs, saying she’d never come back to Gritton. ‘Why did you come back?’ I said.

‘I didn’t want to. But suddenly finding Violet felt like the most important thing in the world. If I could help with that … And I wanted to see my dad and my sister.’

‘Did Kirsty know you were coming?’

‘No. I phoned but she didn’t answer.’

‘Why did you go into the barn?’

‘I couldn’t find Kirsty, and I wanted to see the pigs. I left a message on her landline saying I’d be in the barn.’

‘Wasn’t the barn locked?’

Bex sighed. ‘I guessed the combination. Kirsty always used her own birthday for absolutely everything. But when I got inside, I just …’

‘Just what?’