Nobody knew where she was.

Nobody would be coming here over the next few days, maybe even weeks or months.

What if something happened to her in the house? What if she was attacked and had to get out fast?

It was no good, she couldn’t bring herself to unlock the door. She would just have to hurry. She had no intention of being there for a minute longer than necessary.

Her palms were slippery with sweat as she left the hallway and went into the kitchen. There were no dishes on the draining board or the table. Had Noah tidied up, or had it been like this all along? Tina checked the dishwasher: some glasses, two cups, four bowls, cutlery. She shuddered. It seemed to her as if the family had got up in the morning, had breakfast, closed the door behind them and never returned.

The same feeling dogged her footsteps in every single room: in the children’s bedrooms, the TV room in the basement, Malin and Dan’s bedroom, the dining room and the living room. Even the laundry room was tidy, but who moved to Australia for a year and left clothes hanging in the drying cabinet and dirty crockery in the dishwasher?

Noah had warned her, tried to explain why it felt so wrong when he checked out the house.

‘Everything was slightly off kilter, and yet it wasn’t,’ he’d said.

Only now did Tina understand what he’d meant.

She went back to the children’s rooms, struggling with the sense that she’d made a mistake, that she shouldn’t be here. There was a chance – a remote chance – that the family really were in Australia. How would they feel about her sneaking around their home?

She pushed her qualms aside. She knew exactly why she’d come, and why it had taken so long. That would have to suffice as an explanation. She opened the wardrobes in Hedvig and Max’s rooms. They were full of clothes, just as the shelves were full of toys and books and goodness knows what else. She couldn’t tell if anything was missing, if anything had been removed. There were two books on Hedvig’s bedside table. She picked up the top one, noticed that Hedvig had folded down the corner of a particular page. Tina wasn’t comfortable touching the girl’s possessions; she knew that Hedvig was very grown-up for a twelve-year-old.

She weighed the book in her hand. Afterwards she couldn’t explain why she opened it at the turned-down page; it was just an impulse, something she had to do. The first thing she saw was a note, small, pale grey letters written in pencil.

Hedvig’s handwriting.

Tina read the short sentence as she heard a car pull up outside.

He was wearing Wellingtons.