They’d taken Connie’s car to the supermarket to buy food. They couldn’t use Veronica’s because it had no child seat for Alice. Then they’d driven down a grassy track and had arrived at the boathouse. Alice had been enchanted. Any child would be.

‘You’ll have to be very careful close to the water, dear,’ Veronica had said to the little girl, kneeling down so that her face was very close to Alice’s. ‘It’s very deep here, even so near to the shore.’

Then they’d gone inside and thrown open the windows to let in the air, because at that point it still hadn’t started raining. Veronica had found linen in a painted white cupboard and they’d hung the sheets over the deck rail to air.

Inside there was one big room, with two sets of bunks built into the wall. At the end without windows there was a wood-panelled cubicle with a sink and toilet and a candle on a saucer standing on a shelf. Veronica had shown them how the stove worked and they’d cooked sausages for lunch. It had been Veronica’s idea to phone Joe Ashworth, when Connie had shown her how often he’d called.

‘You don’t want them thinking you’ve got something to hide! Really, I would phone him, dear, or they’ll be looking for you all over the county.’

Then she’d driven away in Connie’s car, saying she’d leave it where no reporter would find it. She’d come back in two days’ time with more food. Though by then, of course, the murderer might have been arrested and it would be safe for Connie to move back home.

That first afternoon, after they’d watched Veronica drive away, they’d gone for a walk in the wood and Alice had loved it, balancing on the fallen logs and picking flowers that later they’d put on the windowsill in a chipped enamel mug. They’d come across a cairn made of small white pebbles that looked like a shrine, a small bunch of primroses laid carefully on top. In the evening Alice had fallen asleep immediately in the bottom bunk and Connie had read by the light of a tilley lamp, listening to the rain and imagining herself in her father’s shed at home.

The next day it had been raining and Alice had been fractious and bad-tempered. There was no television to distract her. Connie would have phoned Veronica, but the battery on her phone was flat. She’d brought the charger with her, but of course there was no electricity in the boathouse. There was a box of games on the table and they played Snakes and Ladders and Snap. The rain battered on the roof and Alice put her hands over her ears.

‘I want to go home! I hate it here!’