‘Yes. That was the point. We had to work when the funfair was shut. You couldn’t have machinery like that operating with kids running around. So we’d wait until the funfair was closed, then use the digger.’

‘Do you have any photographs, by any chance?’ the male officer asked. ‘Of this particular spot as it used to be?’

‘The brochures,’ John said with a nod to Marnie. ‘They’re under my bed.’

Marnie went into the bedroom. Mister was in the exact same spot where she’d left him.

She kneeled down and reached under her father’s bed. She pulled out a battered old suitcase, a cardboard box full of knick-knacks brought from the caretaker’s cottage and never unpacked, a fishing box and several old carrier bags full of junk. Right in the centre was a pile of brochures, tied with string, for Channel View holiday camp, one for each year from when John became caretaker, until the brochures went digital. Marnie had fond memories of these publications. She used to turn their pages compulsively, trying to find her mother in the old photographs because she was there, in a couple of them, standing like a little ghost amongst the holidaymakers, a small, pretty woman with her hair tied back.

Now Marnie sat back on her heels and extracted the brochure for the year Alice went missing. She turned the pages until she found the pictures of the funfair, and there was the flowerbed in question, gloriously full of blooms, the bright colours enhancing the jewelled paintwork of the Bordelaise carousel. The photograph had been taken the summer before, and the willow tree was obviously dying then, its leaves sparse and yellow, its fronds thinning like the hair of an old man.

She took the brochure back into the living room and passed it to the female officer, who showed the picture to her colleague.

‘That’s great,’ she said, ‘really helpful. Thank you. We’ll need to take this, Mr Morahan, if that’s OK with you.’

Marnie’s father shrugged his assent.

Then she said: ‘When you spoke to our colleagues twenty-four years ago, you said you were at home in the caretaker’s cottage for the whole evening on the date that Miss Lang disappeared.’

‘That’s right.’ John nodded to Marnie. ‘She was sick; tonsillitis. She fell asleep under the flume, late afternoon.’

‘I remember the flume,’ said the female officer. She smiled. ‘It was a great ride. Everyone got wet.’

‘It was built on scaffolding,’ John explained. ‘There was a hollow space underneath where Marnie used to hide. When she… when we couldn’t find her, I guessed she’d be there. I carried her back to the caretaker’s cottage and put her to bed.’

Marnie had vague memories of being moved, of the jolting of her body in her father’s arms; whispers, voices around the two of them as the day faded.

‘What time was this?’