Chloe finishes her sandwich and puts the Tupperware away. She pulls a packet of ready salted crisps from her lunch box – she’d only had to mention to Maureen once that she liked them – and opens the bag. She watches as the mother kisses her son’s fat little fingers. Before Low Drove, Chloe would have felt lonely sitting here. She wonders if this mother knows what happened in this park all those years ago. People forget about Angie now. Perhaps they’ve never even heard of her. Or Maureen and Patrick. School teachers, neighbours, priests, public, people quoted in the newspaper articles Chloe’s read – they cared once but then life moved on. Not for Maureen and Patrick. Not for Chloe. Not now.

She walks across the playground and puts the empty crisp packet in the bin. On the way back she sees the woman with the toddler watching her. Chloe checks her watch – it’s almost three. She’ll have a slow walk back to town and then it’ll be time to get the bus home with all the other commuters.

Chloe arrives back to an empty house.

‘Hello?’ she calls. Then remembers Maureen telling her they always go supermarket shopping on a Thursday afternoon.

She’s got used to their routines in the last week or so. Patrick has a part-time job at a local seed factory. He works on the production line there – just for pocket money, Maureen says. Some weeks he works days, others evenings. Chloe likes those shifts the best, the nights when she and Maureen get to eat alone at the little kitchen table and then chat in the living room until they hear his car pull up on the drive, his headlights illuminating the back garden. Then Maureen will get up and leave her sitting in the living room, and Chloe will listen as she dishes up Patrick’s dinner and sits with him at the table while he eats. She goes up to her room then and from underneath her bed, buried way back behind a short pile of magazines and a pair of trainers, she’ll pull out the shoebox in which she keeps a selection of the original cuttings from her bedroom wall and, of course, her pale blue notebook. She’ll write everything down in there. And when she looks at those cuttings, she barely recognizes the Maureen she sees in the pictures. She is sure some of those frown lines have been ironed out already, and she has wondered how much of that she could put that down to her own arrival.

She goes through the kitchen and out into the hall. The house feels still. She stands at the bottom of the stairs.

‘Hello?’ she calls again.

Nothing.