‘I know you think this is nothing. And as her mother, it’s only natural you’d think the best of her. But we all know about your daughter. We all heard about what she did to herself. She’s disturbed. If you were in my position, you’d be worried too.’

The word stayed with Abi even after Siobhan Harte had scuttled away. Disturbed. It reverberated now in the filtered air of the rental car as Mark pressed down on the accelerator, and Abi sat there quietly fuming. She had held back from telling him about the incident. Instinctively she had known that bringing it up would only have caused an argument between them, with Mark accusing her of being overly concerned about Beth’s social behaviour, expecting her to conform with the little vixens in that school, and Abi would be forced to bite down on her words, and suppress what it was she was really concerned about.

Over the past two weeks, Abi had spoken to her younger daughter on the phone a number of times as well as a daily text message. Beth had seemed her usual self – brief, yes, and unforthcoming with information, but she had sounded content. No alarm bells had gone off in Abi’s head. She realized now that a complacency had drifted in.

Up ahead on the motorway, a plume of smoke rose in the distance, blue sirens whirling past. It was the second accident they’d come across, and the traffic slowed, clogging as it met the blocked artery. But at the next exit, they veered off and soon found themselves on narrow roads that skirted wide expanses of agricultural land, trees and hedgerows cropping up then disappearing again, the car passing through shade to sunshine. Metallic grain silos were dotted about the sloping countryside. Muscular brown cows grazed in the dusty heat. The further they got from the motorway, the more the character of the place announced itself, becoming concentrated in the villages with low terracotta roofs, church spires, twisting vines and potted geraniums dotted around empty civic squares.

‘We should stop to pick up groceries,’ Mark said, but Abi was impatient to get there, visited by a sense of excitement that intensified with the heat of the day, the realization that they were finally away from it all. A holiday they badly needed.

‘Valentina said there’s a supermarket in the village.’

‘Let’s hope there’s a bar,’ Mark replied. ‘I’m gasping for a cold beer.’

He was hunched forward over the wheel, eyes fixed on the road, and Abi felt a sudden tenderness towards him. All the grief he had been carrying silently inside him was visible to her in his pallor, the sinewy strain of muscles in his neck. He needed a holiday as much as she did. She put out a hand and touched his forearm.

‘Me too, love,’ she said.