As it turned out, the leaving had been a blessing.

In the little room at the top of the guesthouse, Will stared at Alice staring out of the wedding picture on the screen until his eyes began to burn.

She had told him about her parents while they lay together on her bed in the caravan, the room hot as an oven, the sheets crumpled and damp beneath them. Alice was on her back, one knee bent, her top half propped up by pillows, unselfconscious in her nakedness. She was smoking. The room smelled of her perfume and of sex and cigarettes. She hadn’t looked distressed, she spoke in a matter-of-fact way, but whenever she spoke of Cynthia and Adrian Lang, the energy in the air around her altered and she seemed to shrink a little and be diminished.

Years later, Will had gone to see the Langs, hoping to find out more about Alice and her background. The couple had been reluctant to meet him at all, knowing by then what they hadn’t known before: that Will had known Alice during her short time at Severn Sands, that it was his DNA that had been found in her bed, that he had admitted to sharing a spliff with her on that last afternoon. When he told them he intended to write a book, they’d been horrified. They hadn’t wanted their adoptive daughter’s tragic life sensationalised and Will’s promises that he had no intention of dishonouring Alice’s memory had fallen on deaf ears. He’d found out very little that he didn’t know already, only that Alice had been born in Brighton and handed over for adoption when she was just a few hours old.

In the guesthouse, Will took a swig of vodka from the mouth of the bottle then touched the picture on the laptop screen with the tip of his finger, rippling the pixels. Alice buttoned up in that demure outfit, between her parents, Jeremy hanging slightly back, he the only one in the picture whose body language wasn’t indicating extreme stress. You wouldn’t know from this picture, nor from the early media reports of the time, climbing over one another to describe what a ‘good girl’ Alice had been, that she’d been expelled from three different schools, that she’d been seeing a psychiatrist on and off for more than five years, that she was on medication to help control her anxiety, that she’d been treated for a long-term eating disorder, or that she had tried to kill herself twice, firstly by jumping out of the window of the boarding house at the last school, one that specialised in the education of emotionally damaged girls, and more recently via an overdose of sleeping tablets.