A short path leads from the back of the care home directly into the park itself. There’s a quiet bit of road to cross where drivers are warned with a bright triangular sign of elderly people crossing, but there’s no traffic today and so within a few minutes Chloe is standing in front of the lake she could see from the window of the recreational room. It’s a park she’s been to many times before, and in that instant a thousand sunny days come back to her: picnics with egg and salad cream sandwiches; school trips canoeing on the lake; a spring walk searching for ducklings. Always making a special guest appearance in other people’s families. But never during any of those times had she known what else this place represented. On cue, as if she were part of a film set, a gust of wind picks up, and there’s a sudden chill sent across the air. It feels wrong now, she thinks, that life went on for everyone else, while they swam and sunbathed and tore up bread for ducks, and yet in this very same place it stopped still for the Kyles.

She walks slowly around the lake, slowing her footsteps to a more respectful pace. On a small island in the middle of the water, Canada Geese collect lichen and moss to line the nests they’re building ready for spring. She comes to a little wooden bridge that leads to the back of the park; in the summer, white plumes from steam engines form clouds that sit above the treetops here. She follows the path to the left, out towards a place she knows she’ll recognize from pictures. Here the grasses grow tall, the terrain is wilder, the flat landscape somehow more rugged, surrounded by tall trees that sway more savagely than they do around the lake. It’s more remote here, cut off from the joggers and their puff-panting, and even the dog walkers weaving this way and that with their extendable leads.

Chloe spins around on the spot, scanning the tops of the trees for where she came from and just making out the apex of the roof of Park House in the distance and the scaffolding that towers over it for the new extension. She thinks then of what that matron had said on their first visit and realizes that Park House wouldn’t have been part of the landscape back then, it wouldn’t even have been built; perhaps it was still foundations and rubble, yet to be hauled up from the ground. But who could have guessed it was just a stone’s throw away from where Angie disappeared.

She carries on walking until she spots it: an area where woodchip covers the ground. She recognizes it by the car park it backs on to – the play park where Angie disappeared.