The first featured a passport-sized photograph of a fair-haired girl in her mid teens holding an uncertain smile for the camera, a name, Anya Bauer – German? – and a date of birth: 4 July 1973.

I looked at the photograph and saw that Anya Bauer had teased her hair into some elaborate approximation of some unknown hero. It could have been anything from a pop star to a princess. It could have been Madonna or Princess Diana. No, it was Madonna. Early on, when Madonna’s hair was still quite short. Anya Bauer trying to look older, trying to look pretty – trying to do what every teenager in the world tried to do. Anya Bauer was in her mid teens in the late eighties, so she would be on the cusp of middle age by now.

If she had lived.

The second page was a printout from a contemporary missing persons website with the same photograph and a disclaimer:

Note: the child may look significantly different now to these images due to the age and stylistic differences.

The third and final sheet carried the same image of the smiling girl. Page seven of the Potter’s Field Post, dated 21 August 1988. One sentence: ‘Anya Bauer, 15, has been missing from her home for two months and police are anxious to contact her.’ And there was a telephone number that had probably been defunct for the best part of two decades.

I looked at Anya Bauer’s photograph for a long time, and when I climbed the stairs to my home, just before I opened the door I heard the sound of Stan barking and the untouched joy of Scout’s laughter.

Chapter 28

28

WELCOME TO POTTER’S Field said the ornate wooden sign on the edge of town. FINAL RESTING PLACE OF THE ROYAL DOGS.

Wren snorted. ‘They make it sound like the Taj Mahal or Victoria Falls,’ she said. ‘It’s not even all the royal dogs, is it? Just Henry’s. They haven’t got any of the Queen’s corgis in there, have they? And probably not all of Henry’s dogs.’

The sign featured the Henry VIII of popular imagination – the portly wife-killer in his middle years, not the athletic young king whose statue adorned the school he had founded five hundred years ago. Some goggle-eyed spaniels frolicked by his silken club-toe shoes. They all looked like Stan’s relatives.

It was always a shock to see that there was a town beyond the world of the school. Like a lot of small English towns, Potter’s Field hovered somewhere between gentility and poverty. With Wren at the wheel of a pool car, a little unmarked Hyundai, we passed a pretty village green where a group of local youths sat drinking from cans and smoking, their mountain bikes scattered around them.