Something doesn’t quite fit, but I can’t put my finger on it.

Sophie comes into the kitchen, her small face worried.

‘Is the monster gone?’

‘It was a cat! Can you believe it? Now, we have to pick up Ben soon – can you put on your shoes?’ I kiss the top of her head, and hoosh her from the room.

I look down at the Polaroid again. There’s definitely something off about this photo, but I can’t work out what it is. I set it to one side and begin to examine the next one. This time, the photographer has moved to the other side of the garden and the child is facing the camera. And this time, I’m certain it’s Lily. I can see her face now. I can make out a red dress beneath the navy coat, and a matching red-and-white polka-dot bow in her hair. Behind Lily is the house, lit by low winter sun. How surreal to see my own house like this, thirty-three years earlier. But again, there’s something not quite right.

Then it hits me.

The house is the wrong way around. The back door is on the right, when it should be on the left. And the kitchen window has also moved. My eyes travel across the cream paintwork and up to the second storey. The bathroom window is in the wrong place too.

It’s not my house.

It’s someone else’s.

I look back at the small child, and suddenly I know.

48

June 2018

I STARE AT THE photo. It’s definitely not my house in the backdrop, but that’s not what’s wrong.

It’s the trees.

I lean closer to examine the trees that line the side of the garden that is not mine. Apple trees maybe, or pear. Bare branches against a bleached sky. A pale winter sky.

And a child who looks around Sophie’s age. Three, possibly four.

But during her last winter in Rowanbrook, Lily was only two years old. She turned three the following May, not long before she went missing. I squint at the photo. Could it be a particularly cold day in early summer? One that required a duffle coat and tights? No. The branches are bare. This is not just-turned-three Lily on a cold day in early summer. This is Lily, some time in the winter of 1985–1986, months after she went missing.

But whose garden? And who put the tin in the coal bunker? Robbie or Mary? Although – I look out of the window, then back at the photo – the coal bunker is right at the bottom edge of the garden and accessible from the passageway behind. And, I realize, accessible through the gap with the property next door; the house that used to be Ellen’s. So maybe not Robbie or Mary. It could have been anyone in Rowanbrook. Or outside Rowanbrook. But why?

From upstairs comes a call from Sophie – something about her socks. I slip the photos into my back pocket and put the tin under the sink.