The deputy head is still speaking. There will be a community search party for Ann-Marie with posters and leaflets. If the children meet anyone who says they are a journalist, they should talk to a trusted adult first.

Lauren is one of the first to return to the classroom after break time. A white bakery box is sitting on her desk. As she gets closer she sees it is printed with the pink logo of the local bread shop. She looks around as two other pupils take their seats and lifts the lid cautiously. One black, bulging eye looks up at her in the lumpen mass of a head. She springs back. Its tawny fur is half eaten away and matted with blood. Things squirm at its neck. She slams the flimsy lid back down and looks around again, her body shaking. She opens her mouth to tell the teacher, but then freezes as Maisie and her friends enter the room. Their heads are bowed towards each other as they talk in whispers. She puts her school bag on top of the box and puts them under the table together. She feels as though she is crawling with mites. For the rest of the lesson she imagines the eyes of the rabbit, watching her feet through a crack in the box.

Niall sits motionless at the worn table. The house feels sunken. He notices how the ceiling slopes, how it needs more paint. A damp patch discolours one corner. He has flooring to fit at Catriona’s: seven square metres of bathroom tiles in ‘sea mist’ now that he has finished up in the living room. Another job building kitchen cabinets at the high school’s janitor’s house will have to wait. Sandy always says Niall is too slow and too picky with his jobs. Too scattergun. If he worked more efficiently, like he does, he’d be rich by now. Niall knows it helps that Sandy is always able to get out of bed in the mornings with a clean spring in his step. Sandy says Niall has a face on him like a wounded stag.

Niall wonders now if he has been putting off doing the bathroom. White tiles always remind him. That day seemed to happen to a different, younger man, with a growing business, a future. He was laying hexagonal tiles, kneeling next to sacks of grout in the kitchen of a local family. He painted the room ‘absolute white’. He remembers the day Christine went missing that way, absolute white.