The biggest surprise of all on returning to the past was how small the street looked, how small the houses and the gardens out front were. As a child her dad’s garden had always seemed so big.

She parked outside her old house and sat for a moment to compose herself, then she locked the car and set off up the path that led to the rough ground. Looking back on the row of houses that had been her world before Mary had disappeared, Karen suddenly remembered who else had stood on the hill looking down as she did now.

Closing her eyes, she could hear Mary’s voice shouting at her to ‘get the ball’ after she’d missed a shot. You had to be fast, because no matter how quickly you ran down that brae, the tennis ball moved faster.

She’d eventually caught up with it and, turning, had seen Alec come down from his perch on the hill and stand close to Mary, no doubt whispering his obscenities.

Turning abruptly to dispel the image, Karen made for the distant trees. Nothing much had changed up here, she noted, apart from the rubbish scattered through the undergrowth.

As she approached the wood, she realized it too had shrunk in size, or maybe part of it had been cut down. The remaining trees seemed scrawny; the old stone wall where the crow had stared down on her was broken, the stones scattered.

She carried on towards where she thought the den had been, only to find nothing of the structure remained. None of the branches they’d pulled together to form a wall and a roof. Nothing to show it had ever existed.

She walked on through the remaining trees towards the distant sound of traffic. Emerging from behind a scrubby hedge, she found a tarred road, where before it had been a farm track. In the near distance, new housing fanned out across the hillside near the small reservoir where the boys had gone fishing for minnows.

He’d used to park the van here, pretending he had come to fish, then wait in the woods to watch them. Sometimes, when they’d been there for ages and didn’t want to go home, they’d had to pee among the trees, giggling at how horrified their mums would be if they were to find out.

No doubt he’d watched that too.

A wave of nausea washed over Karen and she had to lean head-down against a stubby tree.

How long had he planned it? When did he decide which one of them it would be? Had he meant to kill or was it a mistake made in that moment?

If he’d come upon me there instead of Mary, he might have left me alive, knowing I would never be brave enough to tell anyone.

Mary would have told if she’d stayed alive, because Mary was old enough to understand what was going on.

It was Mary who told my dad about the flasher at the shops. It was Mary who told Robbie about Alec shouting at us. It was Mary who’d tried to tell her parents about Father Feeney.