She thrusts the box towards him. ‘Join us, by all means, Niall, by all means.’ Then she says, more softly, ‘I know it must be hard for you.’ He’s grateful for the sympathy and the food.

A man, a shopkeeper from the village, comes out of the field with ruddy cheeks and takes a sausage roll that is burnt around the edges. ‘We’re all here to help. Awful, i’n’t it?’ The afternoon is almost dark now, but Niall can see the outline of a little old lady walking up into the forest.

‘Here’s a torch,’ says the shopkeeper, taking one from the back of the van. ‘Come on. We’ve pretty much covered the fields here today, I think. But we are going to try the forest. Is there really any point, Andy was saying to me, back there, but I said yes – of course there’s a point. Of course there’s a point. We don’t want to miss a minute.’

‘It’s not been too long, has it?’ asks the secretary. Her voice is hoarse as she looks at each of them glumly.

Niall lags behind as they trudge into the dense, gloomy trees. When he was a boy, Niall lived on the other side of the town, away from the forest, but he still felt it at the edges of his life like a stretching shadow. He is with five other people: two tall men, a woman and a couple of teenagers Niall thinks must be friends of Diane. He wonders why they aren’t at school, or if they’ve left.

The group wave their torch beams in the fern banks and ditches, but it is still difficult to reach every corner of the forest. Some thickets of gorse simply grow too densely to walk through. It’s so cold out here. His nose is running. At any moment, Niall worries torch light might fall on the girl’s dead body. Images pass through his mind’s eye, of her matted hair, the whites of her rolled-back eyes, her naked, pale skin, her sliced throat. Maybe they’ll just find a body part: a hand, a leg carried away and eaten by wild animals, predatory birds. He doesn’t know how he’ll be able to live with himself. They cross the soft mossy floor, wet with melting snow. The phone signal has long gone and after a while all the trees begin to look the same: thin, tall towers.

The quiet is broken now and again with someone shouting ‘ANN-MARIE,’ and then another, calling into the gloom, occasionally overlapping like church bells. Their line spreads deeper into the forest and crosses paths with other small groups searching as the sun is slowly swallowed by the hillside. A fluorescent tape is strung tautly between the trees like a macabre ribbon to mark their pathways.

‘ANN-MARIE.’

‘ANN-MARIE.’

‘AAAAAANN-MARIE.’

‘ANN-MARIE.’

‘ANN-MARIE!’