Alex pounds up the stairs and along the landing, shouting for his sister. His footsteps echo through the house. No one speaks.

‘I can’t find her,’ he says, standing in the kitchen door, panting.

Jess frowns and Nick’s nerves prickle. The three girls slowly stand up and come into the kitchen. Lorna smiles and says she’ll be around somewhere. ‘Perhaps she went outside. Why don’t you all go and look for her? Spread out.’

Rory and Alex glance regretfully at the crumpets, butter melting through their perforations, and Lorna offers them to Nick with a smile.

‘Take them with you.’

Within seconds the plate is empty. Nick sprints out of the back door with the others. They fan out across the garden, the younger boys towards the barn, Nick to the woods and the older girls to the swimming pool with its clapboard changing room.

He’s on his own, running along the path, deliberately obliterating his own footprints, rain dripping from leaf to leaf before landing on his forehead, his nose, his shoulders. He calls her name as he runs, then reaches the river and stops, short of breath. He’s going to address his fitness when he gets home. A six-pack by Christmas. He can hear distant shouts. The river has risen considerably. It must be a metre deeper than it was yesterday, swollen by the torrential rain. Out of the corner of his eye he sees something that looks out of place with the mud and trodden-down grass of the riverbank. He squints and walks towards it. A pair of trainers. He picks them up, turns them round in his hands and looks out across the water, and his blood pounds in his ears.

GRACE

Tuesday, 24 April 2018

OUTSIDE ANNA’S I TAKE A DEEP BREATH BEFORE RINGING the bell. I hear her footsteps, then the door opens. She stoops to pat the dog, then opens the door wider to let us in. In the kitchen she pours water into a plastic tub. Her hand shakes as she puts it on the floor so that it splashes on to the floorboards and dribbles through the gaps. Toffee sniffs around, whines, and comes to sit right up close to me, leaning against my leg. I rest my hand on his shoulder to settle him.

Anna holds the kettle under the stream of water. To her left a regiment of different-sized black knife handles stick out of a bleached wood block. I try not to look at it. When she turns to me, she’s smiling.

‘Good timing. I needed a break.’

‘You’re not painting this morning?’ She isn’t wearing her overalls.

‘No. Paperwork, damn it.’ She screws up her face in an expression of disgust.