Do something. Do something practical, she thought, remembering how her mum used to say that, if you were in a state, or feeling miserable, just ‘clean out a cupboard’. Do something mundane and dull to take your mind off it.

How the fuck was cleaning out a cupboard going to help find Pete?

Her hands were shaking and her thoughts whirling round in circles. Gemma would be staying again tonight. Meredith realised she wanted her to come back. Gemma was taking it seriously. Gemma knew, like she did, that Pete was in serious danger.

Perhaps she should call her now; ask her to come. She should let her know that she was back at the cottage anyway; Gemma thought she was at Johnny and Trevor’s.

But her phone was in her bag by the front door, and Meredith was so distracted, her thoughts flitting around like butterflies, that she didn’t bother to get it. As she cast her eyes around the kitchen, trying to think of something to occupy her, she spotted the faulty secateurs on the windowsill. She’d brought them home from the gardening section of the shop the other day, to try and fix them. The manufacturers had erroneously bolted the blades of this pair to the canvas fabric of the case, so it looked as if the only way to remove the secateurs was by using pliers to dismantle them completely. If she could get them out of the case, she could probably put them in the bargain bucket and sell them half price.

Meredith found a pair of pliers in a drawer and took the secateurs out into the cottage’s tiny back garden, forgetting not only to text Gemma but also her promise to Trevor to keep the doors locked. Sitting on the step to fiddle with the task at hand in the still evening air, silent bar the distant drumming of a woodpecker, she couldn’t say it took her mind off anything, but at least it gave her something to do. In the pocket of the case she found a separate sharp little gardening tool, which she slid into the bib pocket of her dungarees so as not to lose it.

The bolt on the secateurs was stiff and it took all her strength to turn it, Pete’s face in her mind the whole time, until she had a terror that he was being tortured like this: clamped, turned, pincered, stabbed … The two blades of the secateurs were lying separated and she thought how menacing they looked, like the claws of a monster – but the bolt was still stubbornly attached to the case. Meredith sighed and gave up, bolting them plus the case back together. She’d stick them in the bargain bucket anyway and hope nobody spotted the major flaw.