One of the last things his beloved Maureen had said to him before her stroke was, ‘You know, my love, sometimes I wish I’d just been born as a tree.’

A flash of colour snapped him out of his reveries.

He stopped in his tracks. Had he imagined it?

The rest of the search line team carried on. He turned back and probed the bracken with his stick. Bloody hell. No, he hadn’t imagined it.

A woman’s blue-and-white trainer lay on its side at the edge of what looked like a recently dug area.

He reached for his whistle and blew it.

And as he did so, something else caught his eye. A glint of light in some brambles a short distance away. A shard of broken glass?

47

Tuesday 3 September

Roy and Cleo sat beside Bruno in the ICU of the Royal Sussex County Hospital. The boy was dwarfed by the mass of technology all around him. He lay, eyes closed, breathing through a clear plastic endotracheal tube connected to a high-tech ventilator. Much of his marble-coloured face that was visible was covered in abrasions. His right cheek had a dressing on it. His normally neat blond hair was tousled and greasy. His bruised left hand had two cannulas taped to it, with lines leading up to pumps, regulating the flow from the bags above. An arterial line came out of his wrist. ECG circles were stuck around his chest, with red, yellow and green wires running from them to another monitor that beeped steadily.

Two nurses and a registrar were all busy checking tubes and lines. The Intensive Care consultant talked Roy and Cleo through what was happening and all the monitoring equipment.

Grace’s eyes went up to the bank of monitors on shelving above him, one with a zigzagging line on a small green screen and a row of others giving digital readouts on red screens. He raised his arm over the boy’s head and gently tidied some of his hair. ‘Hi, Bruno, it’s your dad, I’m with you. Can you hear me?’

They were screened off from the rest of the ward by green curtains. There were constant, intermittent beeps, and the occasional whine of an alarm somewhere near. All the initial tests on Bruno had been completed, and he now lay in an induced coma. He would remain in this, Roy and Cleo had been informed, while monitoring continued.

He looked so vulnerable, Grace thought. All his previous concerns about his son were forgotten – he was now desperately anxious for the poor little chap. Wishing there was something, anything, he could do. Wishing he could wind the clock back and, instead of dropping him at school this morning, have done something different. Maybe carried on talking with him?

A couple of hours ago, Cleo had rung home to see if their nanny could stay late tonight with Noah. She reported that Kaitlynn said she was willing to do anything that could help. She and Jack were due to go out to dinner. But, of course, she would cancel it and stay as long as was needed – all night if that helped.