She asked him to drop her at the gate. The last thing she needed was him getting out his mobile phone and filming the raiding of her private property by the forensic lab team in white plastic suits, with their blue tents set up all over her lawn, giving the impression that innocents had been murdered there. He wasn’t to know that actually what had come to pass on her land was much, much worse.

She watched as he drove off, and she did it on purpose because she knew that what he really wanted to do was send a live film of her walking away from his cab and hashtag it, to be snapped up by a national newspaper for a couple of quid. She was adamant that she was at least allowed to avoid this final humiliation.

She watched his tail lights disappear and went inside the gates, arguing with the officer on the gate about who she was, and walking the final three hundred metres or so in silence, listening to the wind and snow, watching the trees become burdened with the weight of nature, and occasionally hearing the loud dump of a large pile of a fresh drift landing on the ground with a whooshing sound.

Most of the forensic vans had packed up and gone, and only three remained on the gravel driveway. She avoided them and went around the back, crossing the grass without detection. When she arrived in her cottage, which she knew would soon come under the same warrant as the main house, she closed the door behind her and stood dripping in the entrance. She no longer felt the cold, and she didn’t bother taking off her coat. She went to the back of the house, without turning on any lights, and got a stool from the utility room. Next she went back outside, towards an outhouse building, tutting as she entered it and found it virtually empty. Things were knocked over and items in disarray. She noted that it summed up her life. She was like an empty storage unit standing in the middle of a vast lawn, open to the elements, stripped of her contents and left bare. She’d tried her best to do what George had asked but she’d been overwhelmed. The shock of losing Bart, who’d looked after her ever since her father’s death, even though he was so much younger than she was, had been a terrible blow, and she felt rudderless and lethargic. George’s instructions were simply too much. She’d told him she needed no help with all the equipment. She’d known she was lying to him but it had got rid of him, for the time being.