The line went dead and he destroyed the phone, walking to the supermarket three streets away, to dispose of it in a wastebin.

He had to get out of the Lake District. The prospect of ever holding his daughter in his arms again was slipping away like the fluttering snowflakes that were freezing everything, stuck in time, like his brain.

He went inside the shop and purchased another pay-as-you-go mobile and inserted a SIM into it as he went to a bench near the recycling area, and called Vivienne.

‘Why have you sent Fabian up here?’ he asked. George figured that attack was the best form of defence at this stage.

‘I haven’t,’ she replied, somewhat irritably. ‘Anyway, how do you know?’

‘He called me.’

‘He’s letting his new position go to his head and making stupid decisions,’ she said.

‘What does he hope to gain from being up here?’ George asked.

‘Well, ostensibly, he’s collecting the body of his late father. Of course, you know as well as I do that Fabian has his own agenda.’

George was tempted to come clean there and then about how unilaterally Fabian had acted, and how she should perhaps keep a closer eye on him, but he held off, sensing that it might be wise to hold on to that information for now, and play mother against son. He had to save some leverage, should he need it, for when the time came, and he was stuck in between these two toxic partners who pretended to love each other. Fabian fawned over his mother, and Vivienne loved to play the doting matriarch, but George knew them both too well.

Neither would take a moment to choose to save their kin when the time came, and George would be stuck in the middle. And he’d still never see his girl.

‘Tidy up.’

He sighed and they ended their call.

Fat flakes of ice landed on his nose, and he wiped them away with one of his hands. The melting water trickled through his fingers. His hands were clean but, like Lady Macbeth, he could see spots on them that could never be erased. This was what Vivienne held over him. It was how Bart had controlled him. It was the same reason that he’d eventually gone over to Vivienne’s side in the first place. It wasn’t money that lured him, or the promise of women and cars, though Vivienne had tried. Only one thing could make him rich beyond his wildest dreams and that was getting his daughter back. For that, he’d do anything, or so he’d told Bart.

That was until he’d seen what his boss did at Laurie Fell. To girls the age of his daughter.