I followed Dominic along the verge of the field which, as far as I could tell, ran the other side of the thick hedgerow that lined the lane leading out of the village. You could hear vehicles passing on the other side but you couldn’t see them at all. I’d been right. Searching for missing kids in this landscape must be a nightmare. Judging from the compacted soil this was a popular back route for the villagers. On those rare times I’d ventured out into the British countryside as a kid I’m pretty sure I was told not to walk across people’s fields.

‘This isn’t a public right of way, is it?’ I asked.

‘Nah,’ said Dominic, ‘but this is an old orchard.’

Which explained the stone perimeter wall, I thought.

‘The council bought it up to build houses,’ he said, of which his mum’s had been the last. They had also allocated a section to a new parish hall stroke community centre and financed that by selling off the rest to a developer.

‘He land-banked it in the hope he could change the terms of the planning permission,’ said Dominic. Apparently the new plan was to build luxury houses aimed at incomers – it all sounded depressingly familiar – but the villagers had managed to block his application.

‘They found a loophole,’ he said.

I asked what the loophole was, but Dominic said he made a point of not asking.

‘I get enough environmental distress from the boyfriend without wanting to get it from my mum as well,’ he said.

The parish hall was about a hundred metres up from the cowshed. It was an odd building with wooden shingle walls and a gambrel roof that looked like it had been shipped over from the Midwest of America and then, presumably, assembled by the Amish synchronised barn-building team. There was an asphalt parking space out the front which was empty except for a shiny new Vauxhall Vivaro in West Mercia Battenberg livery. A lone female PSCO stood guard by the road to make sure nobody else parked there and kept an eye on the scattering of press clustered outside the front entrance. Them being out front was the reason that Dominic had taken us in the back way.