After breakfast, I decided I’d make some more bread. I was still jittery after my visit to DI Bradley and the press conference declaring this unknown suspect to be dangerous hadn’t helped. If I made bread, and lost myself for a bit in the kneading and knocking-back process, I could let the physical work of creating something distract me from everything that was running through my head.

Of course, Izzy wouldn’t be happy with another day cooped up in the yard. She kept staring at the door and whining, a not-at-all subtle hint that she wanted a walk. I was nervous, though. I didn’t want to walk those roads any more, but she caught me in her gaze – her big brown eyes pleading.

‘Just a short walk, then,’ I eventually conceded.

We wouldn’t go far, just down the road a little. Let her have a runabout and then back in time for the dough to have proved. We set out just after ten, when I knew the roads would already have been well travelled and there’d be other people around. Izzy bounced around my heels as we made our way down the yard, past the old barn that no longer housed any animals or machinery, towards the gate.

At first I thought it was an old bin bag, blown by the wind to the gate, clinging onto the rusting metal’s jagged edges. As I got closer I saw that it was something else, satin, black, tied to one of the gate’s rails. There was something sickeningly familiar about it.

I called Izzy back to me and looked around for any sign that anyone was nearby, but all was silent bar the sound of my footsteps crunching on the gravel. I arrived at the gate and pulled it open towards me, my worst fears confirmed when I could clearly see a black bow – just like the one we’d hung on the gate when we were waking Laura from the farmhouse. At the centre of the bow, a bunch of wild flowers, forget-me-nots, tied with thick twine. My heart lurched. A small card, wrapped in cellophane, was pinned in one of the loops of the bow. I lifted it, read the four words neatly printed on it in black ink:

Laura sends her love.

I stumbled back as if I’d received a physical shock, an electric pulsing that knocked my heartbeat off rhythm. Everything became hazy. There was a buzzing in my ears, a screaming from deep inside me. Izzy jumped around my heels, desperate to walk on, but I wouldn’t … couldn’t.