He put the phone back in his pocket, walked along the deserted platform, and crossed a metal footbridge that gave a view of a sprawling old lorry park. He exited the station and turned through a narrow brick alleyway, littered with rubbish, bramble tendrils creeping over the walls. He came out into the town, his footsteps a lonely sound on the pavement, and walked towards the coast road. The air smelled of seawater, of mud, of wind, a smell he’d long forgotten. The long stream of traffic crossing the closer of the two main Severn Bridges murmured high above. From this distance, it looked too slender a structure to be real, like an optical illusion or a trick.

As he drew closer to the seafront, Will could see the great expanse of water of the miles-wide estuary, the darkness at its far edge marked by a trickle of flickering lights emerging along the coast on the Welsh side. The tide was in and the estuary reflected the lights of the bridges and the roads on either side. A faint, ghostly mist was suspended just above the water’s surface. It was the gloaming hour, midway between day and night. Will had forgotten that strange light-catching quality of the water, mysterious and compelling. He’d forgotten how it moved all the time; fierce currents beneath the surface, dragging tides, deep, vast channels and hills of mud and sand. He used to imagine the estuary-bed as a secret landscape, uncovered twice a day before being submerged beneath depths of seawater. It had been a fantastic canvas for the imagination until Alice was feared drowned and then it became something sinister and cruel.

7

Lucy was thirteen and Marnie didn’t normally meet her from the school bus, but she was catching a later bus than usual because she’d stayed on to help make lanterns for the school’s forthcoming parade of light and Marnie was consumed by a deep, nagging anxiety that something awful might happen if she wasn’t there to walk her daughter home. She knew rationally that just because human remains had been found in the holiday park, it didn’t mean this small, windswept town was suddenly full of murderers, that it was no more dangerous now than it had been the day before or the day before that, but she didn’t want to take any chances. Angharad Jones had imbued her with a strong bent towards caution. Best not to give fate any opportunity to trip you up.

It was the bones that were bothering Marnie: cold and lonely and hidden for so long. Alice was a creature of warmth and light and energy, of freedom and open spaces, not dankness and darkness and the sightless, creeping organisms that lived in the dirt underground. The loneliness of those bones was heartbreaking.