My battered yellow Converse trainers crunch over the gravelled driveway as I dart to my Mini. I’m wearing denim dungarees with the bottoms turned up. They feel so much more comfortable now my tummy is expanding. I’m sixteen weeks pregnant and have a small bump. Although it doesn’t look like I’m pregnant, more bloated. I’ve tied my dark curls back with a matching yellow scrunchie. My mum always turns her nose up at my collection of scrunchies. ‘They’re just so . . . eighties,’ she says, rolling her eyes. ‘I can’t believe they’ve made a comeback.’ I haven’t seen her since Christmas and that hadn’t gone very well, thanks to her rude boyfriend, Alberto. The weeks are flying by and I still haven’t told her she’s going to be a grandmother. Every time I think about telling her I imagine her disappointment.

As I get behind the wheel I notice a man standing in the lane, partially concealed by our front wall, staring up at the cottage. He’s stocky, with a face like a bulldog, maybe mid to late fifties, wearing jeans and a waxed jacket. When he notices me he moves away. Was he taking photos of the cottage? He must be another journalist. Most of them have given up for the moment – until there’s new information to be had. But every now and again another will pop up, like the weeds in my front garden. On Saturday, as we made our way down our driveway to take Snowy for a walk, a journalist sprang out in front of us, obscuring our path and taking a photo of us. Tom was furious, and swore at him as he scuttled back to his car.

I pull out of the driveway and continue slowly past him, making sure to give him enough room so he doesn’t have to press himself against the hedge, but as I do I notice him shooting me such an intense look that it shocks me. From the rearview mirror I see him getting into a black sedan parked further down the hill, next to number eight.

Tom came home from work yesterday saying he’d spotted a piece about the bodies in the garden in a copy of the Sun that someone had left on the Tube. It had a sensationalist heading that played on the skeletons at Skelton Place, accompanied by the photo the journalist took of us on Saturday, with startled looks on our faces. ‘Oh, God, Tom,’ I’d said, my face flushed with fear. ‘They’re going to say we’re Wiltshire’s answer to Fred and Rosemary West!’

He’d laughed properly then. ‘No, they won’t. It happened at least thirty years ago. We weren’t even born.’

But my gran was.