Chloe lets herself into the kitchen, pausing to get a glass of water to take up to her room. She plans to read through the notes she’s taken today in the quiet of her room. Through the back door she watches Maureen and Patrick absorbed in their task. She walks into the hall, glancing into the front room and seeing the unopened boxes still stacked inside from their recent move. With so much to do inside the house, she’s surprised they’re working on the garden. Then, a thought occurs to her. She stops, looks back into the kitchen and down into the garden where Maureen and Patrick are still working. She puts her glass of water down by the high skirting on the parquet floor, and slowly pushes at the door to the front room.

The floorboards are exposed in here and dusty net curtains hang at the bay window. It is a dumping ground, just as Maureen had described, and along one of the walls, cardboard boxes balance on top of one another. Each is labelled with a different room, but the highest one, the lid of it sticking up, has a name on it: Patrick. Chloe pauses. From the garden she can hear Maureen giving Patrick instructions of where to dig and how deep. She takes her bag off her shoulder and places it gently on the floor, then tiptoes over towards the box. Stacked on top of two other boxes, it’s too high for her to look in without lifting it down. She reaches up and wraps her hands around the box; it’s surprisingly light, so she lifts it down onto the floor. Carefully, she opens it, and peers in at what appears to be nothing more than paperwork and other odds and ends. But at the bottom there is a shoebox, not too dissimilar to the one underneath her bed. She pulls it out, and as she does so the paperwork collapses into the space it leaves. She sees an old CV, yellowing certificates and what look like school reports. Nothing that she thinks will be significant to this investigation. But this shoebox . . . Carefully, she lifts the lid and peers inside. There is white tissue paper, and nestled within it is a pair of child’s T-bar school shoes. They are red, or once were, and scuffed at the toes. Chloe picks them up, and runs her hand along the soft leather, sliding her fingers inside and feeling indentations where each of Angie’s tiny toes once sat. But why are they here, deep in a box marked Patrick and covered over with paperwork? Does Maureen even know he has them? She lifts them up, turns them around in the light. There’s even still a little dried mud and a bit of sand on the sole. For some reason she thinks of the sandpit at the play park in Ferry Meadows.