When she found out that Alice was missing in a way that meant she was never coming back, ten-year-old Marnie had felt her heart breaking all over again. The pain of her mother’s death revisited her with a vengeance and she retreated into her carapace of silence, this time for good.

As she walked towards the bus stop on the main road to meet Lucy, Marnie let down her barriers and gave vent to the grief she felt at the loss of Alice, grief that was shot through with guilt. Old guilt because of how Marnie had betrayed Alice’s trust and new guilt because she hadn’t realised where she was. She’d been talking to Alice in the wrong place, imagining her all wrong, she who was so sensitive, who was supposed to know these things intuitively. Marnie Morahan was struggling to come to terms with how very wrong she had been about everything.

8

In the old days the narrow streets around Severn Sands seafront had been peppered with signs advertising accommodation, but things had changed. Will had to walk the residential neighbourhood for a full fifteen minutes before he came across a Bed and Breakfast ‘vacancies’ sign hanging outside a Victorian villa on the Aust road. He rang the bell and after some time the door was opened by a tall, long-faced man in his seventies wearing slippers, a grey cardigan and spectacles on a chain around his neck. Antiques Road Trip was playing on the television in a room to one side of the corridor behind him. The smell of fried chops mingled with the perfume of the floral air freshener plugged in beneath the hall table. The stairs led steeply up one side of the hall. On the other was a large photograph in a fancy frame of a heavily built woman with sunglasses pushed back onto the top of her short-cropped white hair, tanned skin; posing in a bright, dramatic landscape that Will recognised.

‘Snowdonia?’ he asked, nodding towards the photograph.

‘Last year,’ said the man. ‘Do you know it?’

‘I did the Three Peaks when I was at university.’

A pair of walking boots had been placed on the shelf beneath the picture and tucked behind the boots was what looked like an order of service for a funeral: a makeshift shrine to a not-so-long-gone wife. Will tried not to be unsettled by the woman’s eyes, small and blue beneath dark, heavy brows that were incongruous with the white hair. Her cheeks, like her husband’s, were hatched with broken veins.

‘Are you looking for a room?’ the man asked with an undertone of suspicion.

‘I need somewhere for a couple of nights.’

‘I don’t usually get people turn up in February. I don’t suppose you’re here on holiday, not at this time of year.’

‘I’m a writer,’ Will said. ‘I need somewhere to hole up while I’m working.’

‘A writer, eh?’