Her phone vibrates in her pocket, making her stomach turn inside the padding of her coat. She pulls the phone out in case it’s Patrick and is filled with relief when she sees it’s Park House. But she can’t answer, not now. And so that same relief turns to guilt. She turns her phone off, as if that might dilute the unease. She has missed a few calls from Park House in the last few days. She’s deleted the voicemails without listening. Claire Sanders has called, too. Twice. Chloe knows what about. The house, the paperwork, the fees, but Chloe is not in that headspace now. Not when she’s living with a killer. She’s shocked even at her mind’s ability to use that word. A child killer. A man capable of murdering his own daughter, then lying to the police – to his wife – for decades. This is not the time to be filling out paperwork for social services. She shakes her head and takes another sip of her drink, then pulls her coat around her. She doesn’t want to get in that car.

She’d forgotten her watch that morning, so now her phone is off she can’t check the time. She looks around, towards the glass lift and the open staircase which criss-crosses the atrium. A wall of plants rises the entire way up to a few square metres of blue sky above them. Chloe can’t help thinking they must attract flies in the summer. When she pictures Phil coming here every day, she thinks of her own desk back at the newspaper. She still catches herself sometimes, walking through the archive in her mind, mapping the aisles made up of metal filing cabinets; she can even feel the old blue carpet tiles underneath her feet. She pauses to pull open drawers. She can still conjure up the scratch and squeak of their runners, see the spines of envelopes that lie inside. That had been home, among those files, those people. She had been happy there. Perhaps she’d even imagined a file being opened up for her if she’d solved this case. She’d even thought for a while that by bringing Angie back she could save the archive, that it would be a huge news story that she had reinvestigated the files – bigger even than the local news – and then perhaps it wouldn’t just be her archive that would be saved, but so many others at newspapers up and down the country, that people would see just how vital that human touch is to a story, just how seriously archivists take their jobs, that they’re not just caretakers of stories, but vital gatekeepers of them. But that’s all fantasy now.