‘Anna. How are you?’ It’s a bad line – I can barely hear her, and I wonder where she is. ‘Listen, I’m at the park with Daisy. Do you think you could come and meet me? I’ve got some stuff to tell you. Things I heard after you left. I think you’ll want to hear them.’

I’m already on my feet, telling Jess to wait for me, I’ll be there, struggling back into my jacket with the phone clamped to my ear. As I stand, something catches my eye, the light reflecting off something on Dominic’s jacket. I peer closer, pinching my finger and thumb together to remove the offending item from the shoulder, swallowing hard as I realise what it is. A long, thin strand of bright blonde hair. The exact shade of Laurel’s hair.

Heart thumping in my chest, I glance out of the kitchen window to where Kelly paces the patio, phone clamped to her ear. It doesn’t mean anything, I tell myself, that hair might not be Laurel’s. And even if it is, it could have been there since . . . any time. I inspect it closely, holding it vertically between my fingers. I’m not even sure it looks long enough to be Laurel’s hair – could it belong to someone else? Is Fran right, is Dominic seeing another woman? Or is it simply nothing, and I am being stupid, trying to read something into a single hair? This whole horrific event has me jumping at ghosts, seeing things that might not even be there. Even so, I pinch the hair between finger and thumb, and wrap it in a piece of kitchen roll before tucking it into the back pocket of my jeans, my fingers snagging on something small and hard in the pocket of denim. The doll. I pull it out, careful not to dislodge the tissue with the hair in it, running my fingers over the doll’s face before I tuck it safely away again.

Yanking a dark blue beanie hat over my hair – although the sun is out, it’s windy and there is a deep, winter chill in the air – I sneak out the front door, silently latching it behind me. I tell myself I’m not sneaking out, but I don’t want to have to explain to Kelly, or to Fran, why I need to get out for a while, and I hurry up the path eager to get to Jess and whatever it is that she’s discovered.