Toby sat back, trying to make sense of what he’d read. He looked at the photograph held up by Steven Harry. It was definitely Rachel, but the description of her as a vulnerable woman with mental health issues didn’t fit with the woman he knew. She was reserved, yes, but he wouldn’t describe her as anxious. She actively enjoyed working with the customers in the bookshop and he’d seen first-hand how well she handled stress. Could ten years really have improved her mental health so much, especially given that five of those years had been spent on the road, living in a van, worrying about where her next meal was going to come from? It was doubtful, surely.

Toby widened his search, but the only other article he came up with had been published five years later, on the anniversary of Rachel’s original ‘disappearance’. It featured Steven Harry, who still did not believe that his wife had killed herself (‘She wouldn’t do that to me’) and who was still vowing to find his lost wife.

Toby cleared the search tab and, using the information he now knew, searched for information about Steven Harry instead. Aside from the pieces about Rachel’s disappearance, there was only one other article in the archive. It was from 1994, when Harry would have been in his twenties, and it detailed his conviction for assault and battery of a woman in the East End, where he lived at the time. He’d spent a year in Wormwood Scrubs.

At eighteen, Toby realized, Rachel had married a man two decades her senior who had already been convicted of a violent domestic crime. A man whom she had evidently spent the past ten years hiding from but who, even now, was very possibly still searching for her.

He closed the laptop and sat looking out at the sun rising over the garden. How could Rachel imagine that this had nothing to do with what was happening to her now? It was at least an avenue that needed to be investigated.

He was deliberating how best to raise this issue with Rachel herself when his phone rang.

‘Sorry to call so early,’ said Alan Crosswick, when he answered. ‘I’ve just found out that what I told you about Dora McCreedy – that Newton Dunbar was too inaccessible to be worth any effort on her part – won’t be true for much longer. And she knows that.’

Thirty-Eight

‘Ezra?’

Edie could hear sounds of industry from the garden next door: sawing, banging, the general noise of small-scale construction.

‘Ezra!’ she shouted again, during a momentary pause in the cacophony.

‘Edie?’

She had her fingers on the latch. ‘Can I come in?’

There was a pause. ‘Hang on a minute.’ There came the sound of his footsteps and then a muttered, ‘Come here, dammit!’ Edie heard the goat bleating furiously, the drum of small, angry hooves and then Ezra calling to her, louder, ‘Okay!’

Edie forced the latch up and levered open the door. The first thing she saw as she passed through the gate was the goat, tethered by a rope on the far side of Ezra’s patio. The animal was dancing up and down, clearly frustrated to find its liberty so curtailed. Ezra himself was standing beside a workbench, into which had been clamped a plank of wood that he had evidently just sawn in two. He was dressed in hardwearing sand-coloured work trousers, scuffed tan boots that looked to her as if they hid steel toecaps, and, despite the day not being a particularly warm one, a short-sleeved T-shirt in a faded shade of green. Both his clothes and his bare arms were peppered with sawdust.