I could have sworn she jumped. ‘I’m so sorry, I took a wrong turn.’ She came towards me, and then there was the bustle of sitting down to eat, and I soon forgot about it and returned to my own inner torment, the question that had been going round and round in my mind since you disappeared: What the hell am I going to do?

Alison

Alison

FEBRUARY – THREE MONTHS LATER

The body lay under the snow for almost two months before it was found.

It happened sometimes in colder countries – Russia, Poland – though it was unusual still in England. But then everything about that winter had been unusual: the plummeting temperatures, the frequency of blizzards, the shock of people who thought they lived in a mild climate suddenly understanding about month-long freezes, snow tyres, pipe lagging.

It was still cold as DC Alison Hegarty stood at the side of the country lane, shivering under the unflattering duvet coat she’d had to buy several weeks into the onset of deep winter. ‘Been here a while then?’

Her partner, DC Tom Khan, was bouncing up and down on the balls of his feet. ‘Doc reckons so. It’s frozen solid, look.’

Alison made herself look at the body in the recently melted snowdrift, which was being worked on by two CSIs, their white suits blending in with the patches of snow on the ground. The ice crystals in the eyelashes, the grey, ashy skin that put her greatly in mind of the contents of her mam’s chest freezer up in Bolton. She knew she had to do this – it was part of her job. And this wasn’t the first person to have frozen to death that winter; they’d already found two homeless men stuck to the pavements in Sevenoaks, a damning indictment of a town where just feet away people spunked sixty quid on their Christmas turkeys.

But that was different. They had not been murdered.

‘How long’ll it take to get it out?’

‘Hours yet. Think of it like defrosting a freezer.’ Tom made a chipping motion with both hands. He had moved down here from an East London beat, and liked to remind her he’d seen some terrible things.

Alison shivered even harder. ‘Bloody hell, it’s cold.’

‘Winter is coming, mate. Well, it’s here. Don’t suppose there’s a handy trucker’s stop nearby?’

She shook her head in the Raisa Gorbachev-style fur hat she’d taken to wearing. Those Russian women, they knew how to deal with cold, and that was by throwing all sense of fashion out the window and essentially going out dressed as a bed. ‘There’s nothing nearby at all. Just those houses.’