The final card was the first, dated 14 January, and was the soggiest, the words smeared where the rain had got to the ink. It actually looked like tear tracks across the thick card.

Dearest Kyle,

Thank you so much for yesterday, I’ve never eaten oysters before! I thought they’d be slimy but they were nice. And champagne too! I’ve never stayed in a posh hotel before, my dad is far too tight to ever pay for such luxury. And what we did in that huge supersoft bed, my God! It is wonderful to be with a real man, someone who knows how to please a woman. You can rely on me always. When I finally get my A-levels and leave college, I want to be with you. Always. Always, always. I have wanted to change the world, ever since I was fourteen. To break the rules, not enforce them like my dad (he hates anyone knowing he’s a cop! I don’t think he is much of one to be honest). Only two days to wait until I see you again. I wish you didn’t have to travel so much, the absences tear me apart. I love you. I really, really love you.

Van xxx

Perry’s hands were shaking. The enormity of the transgression by this hateful man. Taking his wife and his daughter, one thirty-eight years old and the other just seventeen. Halliday didn’t even value them, tossing aside the testaments of Vanessa’s love into a skip to be destroyed by the rain. Vanessa, his own child, who had not even written him a birthday card this year, was completely in thrall to this monster. Fantasies of revenge uncoiled in his mind. Of murder, torture and dismemberment. His rational physicist’s brain was helpless to extinguish the mediaeval furnace of rage which consumed him. He squeezed his eyes shut, fighting for mental balance, for sanity, but in the poorly lit, rough wood confines of that garden shed, surrounded by tools and rusting garden implements, he had discovered a personal dungeon of hell.

What have you done with my daughter? Where was she? Were there any clues he had missed? He picked up a garden fork, and stabbed at the wooden floor of the shed with it again and again and again, crying with anger and fury, until the screeching pain in his shoulder, unused to such activity, forced him to stop. Panting, sweating, his eyes wild, he tried to reach for rationality.

He put the cards aside and turned to the bin bag full of stolen recycling. Peering inside, he fished out pieces of paper, leaving the drinks and food cans. There was a great mass of shredded material, which was disappointing. What was left was largely old correspondence relating to Angie Wright’s property business, AWL Ltd. He only spent five minutes on it. There was nothing of any interest there.

A light from the kitchen alerted him to Mel’s arrival. Through the shed window, he watched her pacing about in the kitchen, putting on the kettle, getting a cup down from a cupboard. Estrangement perfectly described his feelings for her. He had thought he knew almost everything there was to know about this intelligent, petite, well-turned-out career woman, running her own wellness shop, with an MBA and a glowing self-confidence that put his to shame. But now he looked at her as if he was seeing her for the first time. As a stranger. For she had concealed something so cosmically enormous within their marriage. He was staggered never to have had a clue about it.