‘The only clue was an empty champagne bottle that had been placed in the bin beneath the sink inside the caravan,’ said the reporter. ‘The only fingerprints on the bottle were Alice’s. Two glasses had been washed and left on the drainer.’

‘So whoever she drank the champagne with killed her?’ Lucy asked.

‘Probably,’ said John.

‘But they don’t know who that was?’

‘No.’

‘Couldn’t they look on the CCTV to see who went in and out?’ Lucy asked.

‘They didn’t have CCTV at the park back then,’ said John. ‘Anyway, you don’t want cameras everywhere watching your every move when you’re on holiday, do you? You want to relax.’

‘They have them at Channel View now. I mean they used to; before it shut down.’

‘That’s why everyone’s always so stressed all the time. Cameras everywhere. Big brother, watching you, not letting you get on with anything.’

‘What happened to the caravan?’

‘Caravan 49? They took it away.’

It had gone on the back of a flatbed lorry and was never replaced. Instead, Mr and Mrs deVillars put planters on the concrete base where it used to stand and let the grass grow around it and children used the open space between Caravans 48 and 50 as a playground.

33

Will lay back on the guesthouse bed with his hands behind his head and closed his eyes. He was exhausted: racked.

It was partly the residue of his hangover, partly grief and partly simply having reached the end of a trying and traumatic twenty-four hours where nothing, not one single thing, had gone as he would have wished. Witnessing Camille deVillars’ distress the night before had troubled him, the phone call with Saoirse had been difficult, speaking to his mother had been painful and he’d almost been caught sneaking around Mr Bradshaw’s front room. But out of everything, it was Marnie’s antipathy that played on his mind the most. It hurt. It hurt because he knew she had every right to hate him. He’d behaved like an absolute dick towards her. He could justify his betrayal of Marnie any way he liked: yes, he’d been scared; yes, he’d been distraught; yes, he was little more than a kid himself, but all these applied to Marnie too; more, because she had no choice in what happened to her.

Marnie was the only person on earth who he could talk to about Alice, who would understand because she’d been there, and she’d loved her too. But he couldn’t talk to Marnie because he’d fucked her over when she was ten.

Will Jones squeezed his eyes shut and wondered if there were any way to put things right between him and Marnie, or if it was too late; if there was no going back.