When no answer came, he cracked it open an inch and peeped inside. Soft daylight filtered through the curtains. The bedroom’s walls were bare. A mound of clothes sat shapelessly in a chair beside a chest of drawers. There was a framed photo of Chloe when she was just a kid sitting on her mother’s lap. Her smile looked even bigger, as though she’d grown into it as an adult. Books were stacked on the floor beside the boots she’d kicked off.

‘Chloe,’ he repeated, the word steadily losing sense.

She was hidden beneath the duvet. Only a foot could be seen poking out. Floorboards creaked as Ben tiptoed over to her. He sat on the edge of the bed and gently shook her awake. The foot retracted back into the warmth. She turned with a sigh, sleepy-eyed, with the tiniest weight of a frown, no doubt expecting more bad news.

‘Get your boots back on,’ Ben said. ‘We’re going to see the doctor.’

16

The car jerked to a stop, lurching Chloe against her seatbelt. The brick wall had stretched on for what felt like miles, but there was finally a break.

‘Is that it?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Ben replied. ‘I suppose it must be.’

‘It doesn’t look very welcoming, does it?’

The gate wasn’t the decorative, wrought-iron variety common to moneyed estates. There was no frill or embellishment, and no obvious means to open it. Vertical bars stood like an armoury of eight-foot spears, glossy black and reinforced with a cross-brace that marked the entrance with an X. A monstrosity of this size wasn’t designed for residential use. And yet there it was, surrounded on both sides by red-brick walls garlanded with coils of wire; silver thorns in the sunlight.

Barry’s coordinates had pinpointed their destination. But none of the roads leading there were deemed travel-worthy by Chloe’s GPS, and so they drove blind. Sparling’s home wasn’t too far divorced from civilisation. But there was nothing there except for some scraggy meadows and clumps of trees that made negotiating its serpentine lanes even more puzzling. Eventually they found themselves driving by the shadow of a brick wall, and then the world’s most intimidating gate came into view.

‘This is where Barry told us to go,’ Ben said, nodding at Chloe’s phone, ‘and we haven’t seen another house for miles.’

‘Why is it that when I’m with you I always end up in the arse end of nowhere?’ she said.

‘I could say the same about you.’

Ben pulled the car up to the gate, where the coarse road turned smooth. He had expected to find a house, not a fortress. Between the bars, the driveway veered off through a spinney of old oak. The answers they sought were in there somewhere. But Barry may have underplayed just how unusually private Alec Sparling was when they had spoken.