Because the media pack were camped outside the front door, I went out the back and hopped over the garden fence and onto the unofficial – definitely not a right of way – footpath that ran behind the houses. Now that I knew what to look for, I could see that nearly all the late-twentieth-century build in the village had gone up on decommissioned orchards. In some places the old fence line had become the edge of people’s back gardens. One remnant of the original orchards remained behind the Old Vicarage and I saw a dip in its back wall where a pair of eleven-year-old girls could have easily climbed over. This must have been their semi-secret path. No wonder they’d been inseparable since they were old enough to express a preference – it must have been like having their own secret garden.

The pair would have had to split in September – Nicole would be going up the road to Lucton School, fee paying, while Hannah would be commuting into Leominster to attend a state school. Fear of this separation was put forward as one of the narratives that might lead to them running away together. I wondered what being split up might be like – I didn’t have any friends that had gone to posh schools, unless you counted Nightingale.

The path led me out onto a lane by Spring Farm and after a short cut down the back of the graveyard – Rushpool was an old enough village to have two – and I came out by the car park of the Swan in the Rushes where Beverley was waiting with the Asbo. All without attracting the attention of the media.

Me and Beverley parked the Asbo at the Riverside Inn, crossed the bridge and found the official Mortimer Trail footpath a hundred metres further on. We followed it to another gate and stile and through another field munched down to a green fuzz by sheep and then over a barbed-wire fence into a lumpy field of long grass. The path was barely visible as a slightly trampled diagonal, but luckily we could see the next stile at the far corner. A solitary goat watched us go past – we were probably the most interesting thing that had happened all summer.

I paused mid-field to orientate myself using my phone. We were less than three hundred metres from where we’d found the dead sheep. I looked for it and I could spot where it had lain in the next field.