‘I’m really, truly sorry, Em, and I will find a way to make it up to you, but first can I ask you one more tiny favour?’

‘Oh my God, you’ve got some neck.’

‘Please! I don’t know who else to ask.’

She was silent for a moment. He imagined her weighing up her options.

‘What is it?’ she asked at last.

‘Could you look something up for me?’

‘Why don’t you do it yourself?’

‘I don’t have any internet here. It’s nothing complicated. I just need the details from a wedding certificate. You can get those on family history websites, right?’

‘Right.’

‘So it wouldn’t take very long. And I’ll reimburse you whatever it costs.’

‘Is this still to do with the holiday park murder?’

‘Yes.’

‘It’ll be another favour you owe me.’

‘Put it on the tab,’ Will said.

He gave her the names, Denise and John Morahan, and their approximate ages. He didn’t know where or when they’d married. It wasn’t a huge amount to go on but Emily said she’d give it her best shot and promised to get back to him as soon as she had some news.

When the call ended, Will was lonely again.

The fire was dying and so was the battery in his computer so he shut it down to preserve what was left.

He felt wretched.

He needed some air. He needed the space to think, to put his ducks in order and come up with a strategy.

He went out, leaving via the back of the cottage, treading the overgrown path down to the mud-lands exposed by the receding tide. The air was fresh, the smell distinctive: diesel, ozone and sea. The wind ruffled his hair. Gulls called like banshees high above. He had thought he was coming closer to Alice by returning to Severn Sands but all the time she had been moving away.

Will remembered the boy he used to be, and all the years between then and now, years that had passed quickly like dates torn from a paper calendar, and not one of them had given him a memory that came close to the memories he had of the summer of Alice.

And now it was over. No more memories. Alice had been lost and found and lost again; this time for ever.

Eventually, he reached the place where Alice’s dress had been found: the ancient slipway into the water, the planks water-logged and black, and the jagged post on which the scarlet fabric had been caught. It was the dress that seemed to prove the theory that Alice had ended up in the Severn, drowned, but it had been a carefully planned red herring.