He watched Rolli’s shape pull the wheelbarrow out and place it with a bang on the ground beneath the ledge of the van. Rolli heaved himself back inside the vehicle and now it was Pete he was coming for. He got behind him and, grunting with effort, shoved him towards the edge, as if Pete was a rock. Pete felt his shins scrape and protest on the van’s metal floor. Then he was unceremoniously rolled off the edge, back into the barrow. He landed painfully, face upwards, which spared his poor head from more trauma, but meant his tied feet and arms took the impact. He feared he’d broken something in one of his arms – he couldn’t even tell which – so intense was the pain.

Rolli loomed forwards over him, into his eyeline, and Pete’s heart almost seized up in his chest. He was panting with fear. His assailant wore a woolly beanie hat pulled low over his forehead, and a scarf tied tightly around the lower half of his face, so that only his eyes were on display. Not the balaclava Pete had at first assumed it was. If he survived this, he thought, he’d recognise those eyes again anywhere. Even in the dark, he could see how pale they were, washed-out looking, with light, stubby lashes.

But instead of the knife Pete expected, when Rolli’s hands shot forwards they were holding a long, thin piece of fabric, like a strip ripped from a curtain. Was he going to be throttled? His windpipe shrank and recoiled in his throat. But instead, Rolli tied the fabric around his eyes, wrapping it around Pete’s head twice and securing it at the front, squeezing the bridge of Pete’s nose.

Then he felt himself being wheeled off, which jarred his arm further. On his back in a haze of agony and confusion, Pete had the weird sensation of being a baby again, wheeled along in a pram in the dark, but instead of his loving mother’s face peering in at him with clucks and smiles, there was just blackness where her face should be. Silence, apart from the squeak of the barrow’s wheel and the man’s breathing, still laboured from the effort of moving him.

He remembered again the missing piece of Andrea’s jigsaw, the one that she had obsessed about. The face of the baby in the pram. She and Meredith had discussed it that night on his boat.

He was that missing baby. Andrea had been right to obsess about it, and he hadn’t listened. If he had, perhaps they could’ve saved her.

He wanted Andrea.

He wanted his mother.

The silence became like a blanket of fear pressing down on him. They must be in deep countryside. Why was he being moved? And to where?