He’s just an overprotective big brother, Nathalie used to insist. Especially after everything we’ve been through.

There was only one photo of her daughter up here. Daniel’s niece was framed separately from the rest, a miniature Nathalie with long dark lashes and unraveling pigtails. Billie. Her young eyes seemed to plead with Paul, and to reproach him, and to speak in desperate harmony with Freya: Find me.

Paul fought to control his breathing. White spots blotted the darkness behind his eyelids. If he could just keep them still, stop them swirling . . . He flailed to the rear window and pushed, relieved when it opened and fresh air burst in. Paul held his face to the coolness, but when he opened his eyes he got another shock.

Because he hadn’t realized. Hadn’t got his bearings, hadn’t remembered the geography of the area well enough.

You could see the woods from here. A few miles behind the house, they stretched out like a dense carpet, the twilight casting them in a violet glow. The trees seemed to huddle closer together than ever, as though closing ranks, protecting their secrets.

Nobody goes near the woods anymore, Nathalie had once told Paul.

And it wasn’t so hard to understand why the locals had steered clear ever since what had happened, or how they could believe, in the absence of any other explanation, that the black spaces between the trees had swallowed the little girl who’d never been found.

In truth, Paul had no idea what had happened to five-year-old Billie in those woods, almost twenty-five years ago. A day that had changed his own future, though he couldn’t have known that as he’d watched the story unfold on the news. The only witnesses, Nathalie and Daniel, said Billie had strayed too far in while playing. The search of the woodland had lasted months. The wider search for Billie had continued indefinitely—along with the stream of donations to the search fund Daniel had set up in aid of his niece.

From the moment Billie’s disappearance hit the news, Daniel Sanderson had had everyone in his pocket. The public were all behind him. The press ran campaigns to Find Our Beautiful Billie, always featuring quotes from her distraught uncle. Nathalie had shied from the limelight, would duck her head behind Daniel’s shoulder as the press photographed them leaving their block of flats. Paul still remembered thinking at the time, when he was just an ordinary police officer in south London: There’s something about her, about the two of them. But mostly: There’s something about him.