Soon, sweating in my big coat, I reached the house, a ramshackle nineteenth-century farmhouse. It had been Anna’s home, although Alex’s family owned it and she would have tried to take it from him in the divorce. She’d kept chickens and I could hear their soft cheeps in the distance; I wondered who would feed them now. The place was big for a single woman and a child. And lonely. I thought about her setting off early that morning, pulling on her trainers and heading into the clear bright dawn. Was she in the habit of early solo walks? I had no idea. Maybe she hadn’t even showered yet or put on a bra, little knowing she would never come back, that her body would be undressed by a stranger’s hands in a mortuary, her flesh laid bare. The patch of leg hair she’d missed on a shin, perhaps. The scars of Sam’s birth. The mole on her shoulder she’d been meaning to get checked out.

The farmhouse appeared to be in darkness. It had a dilapidated air, the bricks crumbling in places, a lingering farmyard smell. I wouldn’t have wanted to live here, so out in the middle of nowhere. That was a point. Sam had been with Alex on the night of Anna’s murder, in the flat in town. Anyone could have been out here with Anna and no one would know. Did she have a lover, as Alex had suspected? Someone who had killed her and dumped her body in the woods? But how would a stranger know exactly where to leave her body so that I would find it, or how to frame me? How would they know I was Casey Adams? I couldn’t make sense of it.