Music drifted across the sun-withered afternoon, touching leaves so dry the swell of notes might shake them free, and through the open windows of several nearby houses.

Those houses, grouped like guardians in this modest street on the edge of a small town near the Essex coast, had been standing there for many years and borne witness to it all.

From behind the curtains of one of those houses, someone watched the Lockwood family crawl into the driveway behind the moving truck, snap off the radio and emerge from the silver shell of their car, unfolding legs and shaking out arms cramped by hours of travel.

An older woman, attractive, wearing crumpled linen trousers, shielded her eyes and squeezed the hand of a man, who did not squeeze it back. A boy, eight or nine, bounced around, tugging at his mother’s arm. A teenage girl, languid limbed and insouciant, brushed her thumb across the screen of her mobile phone and did not look up at the house at all.

That someone watched this family, shiny with promise, and wondered which of them would break first. Because nobody came to The Avenue without death seeping through the gaps in their walls.

Some new families handled the proximity to murder better than others. Two or three had left within weeks, wearing the financial pain of a quick sale. But which details of the killings had the real estate agent shared with the latest arrivals? How much should be shared, and when?

Before these questions could be answered, the decision was made.

A wail first. High-pitched. Insistent. Joined by another, and another, rising in rhythm and intensity. A concerto; the solo instruments of police sirens, a rolling bass line of distant traffic and the alto voices of the birds that nestled in this tree-lined avenue and the woods beyond.

The woods beyond.

The neighbor glanced down the street to the archway of branches and brambles that crowned one of five public entrances to Blatches Woods. Thirty-seven acres of greenery tucked into this pocket of suburbia, crisscrossed with footpaths and bridleways. A place to get lost in. Thirty-seven acres that had come to dominate the newspaper headlines and breakfast tables; that had lowered property prices; that had cast a pall across this most ordinary of places.

The word rolled around the neighbor’s mouth. Pall. A cloth used for spreading over a coffin.

The Avenue filled with noise and blue light as the police cars—two, three, four of them—swerved into the curb in front of the footpath that led to the southeast corner of the woodland. A van—FORENSIC SERVICES imprinted across its side—followed a minute later.

Officers—some uniformed, some not—gathered in a knot, waiting for the white suits to ready themselves. One—his hand on the collar of a dog—was being sick. Even from behind the safety of the window, their sense of urgency was palpable. A need to cut through the decaying strings of vines that crept across the carpet moss and bracken, to trample deeper into the dense wall of trees, to interrogate the dog walker or jogger or whoever had found it this time.