Marnie put her hand in the pocket of her ancient coat and pulled out a handful of dried pilchards. She offered one to Mister through the muzzle, but the dog backed away, believing it to be a trick, expecting to be punished. Marnie dropped the treat on the ground. Mister stared at it, but made no move to eat it.

What have they done to you? Marnie wondered. What did they do?

Mister clamped the stub of his tail between his back legs and shivered.

They walked on, Tessy running ahead to flush out a partridge that was hiding in the foot of the hedge, wagging her spaniel-flag tail. The partridge squawked and flapped clumsily into the air, trailing red feathers. The small group stepped carefully over the railway sleepers laid across a drainage rhyne, silvery reeds growing tall along its length and walked to the end of the track. Marnie put Tessy back on the lead before she opened the gate and they went through together.

To their left, now, was the old wall that surrounded the gardens of the deVillarses’ house, a three-storey Gothic villa with the official name of Blackwater but known to the residents of Severn Sands town as the Big House. To their right was the old Channel View holiday park where Marnie’s father used to be caretaker and where she had spent all her free time growing up. It was no longer a holiday park. Now it was a building site.

For almost a month bulldozers had been churning up the fields where the caravans used to be ranked, breaking the foundations of the old amusement park and funfair. The ancient hedgerow that used to encircle the park was gone, replaced by interlocking metal barriers and signs warning people to keep out. Piles of bricks and plastic piping were stacked over what had once been Marnie’s playground. The old apple tree that only last week she’d made the builders swear they wouldn’t touch lay on its side, roots exposed like a great muddy scab, branches reaching out helplessly. Marnie had wished a curse on those builders when she saw what they’d done to the tree. She used to scramble up its trunk and hide amongst its leaves when she was little. She knew every branch, each knobble and handhold. The tree had been a friend to Marnie and she didn’t have many friends.

‘It was dying anyway,’ the foreman, Gabriel Romanescu, had said when she’d challenged him. ‘If it had been healthy it wouldn’t have gone so easily.’

Marnie had stared at the tree, the branches that used to cradle her snapped like bones.

‘I’m sorry you’re upset,’ Gabriel had said, filling in the spaces left by Marnie’s silence, as people invariably did. ‘I don’t like it when we have to remove trees but sometimes there’s no choice.’