Why would the police, who were rushed off their feet, under-resourced and stretched to breaking, want to send a car for him to retrieve a lost phone?

His hands shook as he gripped the wheel, tighter and tighter. He willed himself to calm down, theories about what the police wanted whirring around his head. Surely if anything terrible had happened, Ella would have told him herself. Unless she couldn’t. He told himself that the phone had been found after she had clumsily dropped it out of her always open bag – a habit he admonished her for – and it had been handed in. That was all. She’d been heading into town to do chores, and she’d mentioned a run. That was it: maybe she’d dropped her phone running and was wandering around looking for it. He often couldn’t get through to her when she was running; it was as if she fell off the edge of the earth.

Don’t worry…

She was probably at home, hoovering, or out in the garden, oblivious to the fact that she’d caused a fuss. Perhaps she was in the bath.

He drove on autopilot, having negotiated the tiny lanes thousands of times. But today, he didn’t take any notice of the colour of the sky when it hit the lake, or the birds of prey circling over a field, or even the smiles on faces satisfied with their hike for the day and heading to pubs.

He kept experiencing waves of nausea and fought to concentrate. He was shocked when he arrived at the entrance to his driveway, because he recalled none of the journey. He pulled off the road and drove through the trees to where two police cars waited for him. Two, not one. As he got closer to the house, the doors of the cars opened and two plain-clothes officers climbed out of one, and two uniforms out of the other. He tried to read their faces, but they weren’t looking at him.

His hands shook as he parked and got out. His chest felt as though it was on fire. One of the uniforms came towards him and introduced himself, asking if they could go inside. He was firm but gentle: the voice of pity. Thomas had written enough reports and fired enough people to know that a shitstorm was coming. He swallowed hard and fiddled with something. He dropped his keys and bent to pick them up.

‘What’s all this about?’ He couldn’t bear to enquire after his wife by name.

‘Can we go inside, sir?’

Thomas looked away from them and found the correct key, putting it in the door and turning it. The door swung opened and he stepped inside, wanting to run straight out the back, delaying the horror of the unknown.