Will switched on the light and got out of bed. He unscrewed the lid on top of the vodka bottle and poured a good measure into his glass. He took a sip of it neat.

He’d dismissed the idea that Denise might have been Alice’s birth mother before, but now he came back to it again. Denise spoke with a south coast accent. She had a deep faith. She was in the right age bracket to have been Alice’s teenage mother.

But if Denise was Alice’s mother, then Alice must have known. It could not have been coincidence that she’d come, out of the blue, to the same small town where Denise had lived; to the same small town where she had died. And if she had known Denise was her mother, she must also have known that she’d missed her, that Denise was already dead.

Will had reasoned before that Alice would not have come all the way to Severn Sands knowing that her birth mother was already gone. But perhaps he’d been too quick to reject the possibility.

Even without Denise, there were still reasons for Alice to come.

For one, there was Denise’s grave.

And for another, there was her half-sister, Marnie.

50

Marnie stood at the entrance to the school playing fields, the wind whipping her hair about her face, and her coat flapping, rain bulleting into her skin, searching the night for the missing dog.

She kept imagining that she’d spotted Luna, but it was only the wind thrashing the shrubs and branches, making wild shadows as the clouds raced past the moon.

A section of the wall that surrounded the cottage garden had been brought down by a fallen branch; Luna had jumped over it and escaped. She would be terrified by the thunder, desperate to find somewhere she felt safe. Even as she searched the town Marnie thought it was most likely that the dog would be heading for the old concrete army shelter on Catbrain Point where she’d originally been found, the place she had, for a while, regarded as home.

The winter trees waved their bony arms, the wind howled. Marnie left the playing fields and went into the street.

Luna, please, she begged, come to me. I’m here!

But Luna didn’t come and Marnie had almost reached the church, wondering if she should go back for the car and drive to Catbrain Point, when she saw a figure lurching towards her through the night. She stepped back into the shadows. The figure was walking erratically, hunched over and it was only as it stepped out of the church gate and into the light of a streetlamp and she saw the smaller shape of its companion that she recognised who it was. Her heart began to pound. It was her father. He’d been in the churchyard.