Marnie wiped the cutlery, rinsed it, stacked it in the drainer. She gazed into the soap bubbles and thought back. In the afternoon, after Trip killed the guinea pig, Camille deVillars said she’d been looking all over for John and couldn’t find him. Marnie had looked too. She’d searched high and low, and he wasn’t in any of the usual places. He wasn’t in the funfair; only the travelling men had been there, and when she’d asked after her father, they’d told her they hadn’t seen him. And later, when she woke up sick in the night, she’d been alone in the caretaker’s cottage, she was certain of it.

So where was her father? Where had he been?

When the dishes were finished, Marnie gave the rest of the kitchen a cursory clean, watered the pot plants on the window sill, swept the floor and cleaned TT’s bowls. She took her father’s musty laundry out of the washing machine and hung it over the airer in the tiny conservatory where the sun, if there was any the next morning, would find it. Then she made coffee and took it into the living room, on a tray. The card game had finished.

‘Your girl made mincemeat of me,’ John said. Lucy was kneeling on the floor, ordering the cards with a self-satisfied expression on her face. She put the cards back in their box and shuffled onto the rug by the fire to stroke TT. She was a girl so comfortable in her own skin that it made Marnie proud simply to look at her. She avoided her father’s eye and went to stand close to Lucy. Lucy reached for the controls and turned up the volume on the television. The BBC local news was showing an ‘in-depth’ report from the holiday park.

‘Alice, who was twenty-three years old, had come to Severn Sands for a holiday,’ the reporter said. It was the same woman who’d tried to interview Marnie the day before.

‘She’d be forty-seven now, if she’d lived,’ said John.

Lucy turned round and looked up at her mother. ‘Older than you?’

Yes.

‘Really old then!’ murmured Lucy. Marnie kicked her gently with the toe of her sock.

The television cut to video of an old report from the time of Alice’s disappearance although the same reporter was still talking. Severn Sands looked like a fictional town, one from a period TV drama: the dated cars, the swishy haircuts, every other person in tracksuit bottoms and trainers.

There was the caravan, Caravan 49, with the dent in the outside wall as if someone had punched it. The reporter was saying that questions were being asked about why the police hadn’t investigated Alice’s disappearance more thoroughly at the time.

‘Because everyone thought she’d left of her own accord,’ John said.