That done, she collapsed back against the floor, exhausted, and thought about giving up. It would so be easy to lie here all night, admit that she was not made of strong enough stuff for this journey. She could drag the tarpaulin she had in her backpack over her body, and sleep until the morning, when she might feel stronger. She could retrace her steps, get herself to a hospital, forget about the letters and the codes, and go back to her life knowing that she tried, at least.

I tried, Bobby. I really did.

But then, the knife would still be there, every day, twisting in her heart, always.

And more than anything, she wanted to wake up and feel safe again. Safe, and whole.

No. She needed to finish this.

‘Get up, Laura,’ she said, the words swallowed by the incessant patter of the rain. Then, louder:

‘Get up.’

And, unbelievably, she did. She packed everything away carefully, tested her balance, ignored the throbbing burn that devoured her leg, and stood up. She checked her compass, and then looked at the folded square of map in a rain-proof case that also hung around her neck. Despite the poor light she was fairly certain she was still roughly on track. Muttering to herself as she calculated her location, she reset her position to compensate for the fall down the embankment, put her injured leg out tentatively, and took a wobbling step forward. Then another, and another.

‘I’m coming, Bobby,’ she muttered, and the birds in the trees chirruped back softly.

6.

Confrontation was unavoidable, she supposed, a natural by-product of a missing child scenario, but that didn’t make it any easier to deal with. Being the last person to see Bobby alive made quiet, uncommunicative young Laura a target for other people’s frustration and grief. And Bobby’s mother set her sights on that target early in the aftermath of her son’s disappearance.

She turned up at Laura’s house a fortnight after he had left in the blue van, banging her fists against the front door in a frenzied manner. Laura was supposed to be in school, but was instead curled up in a foetal position on the sofa, a bowl of popcorn lying untouched by her side, a film playing on the TV that she looked at, but did not see. Her own mother had taken holiday to be with her. Mrs Scott did this without complaint at first, but as the days went by, she became restless. She hovered anxiously near her daughter, sensing her need but also finding it a bind. She dropped remarks into each passing hour about how much extra work she would have to do as a result of her absence, and the impact it would have upon her already overloaded schedule. Laura bore these remarks the same way she came to bear all remarks: acknowledging them, shouldering the burden of them stoically, accepting everyone else’s discomfort and pain as her own fault, somehow.