Will’s mother never came to the cricket matches either. She refused to get involved on the grounds that why should she give up her Saturdays to make food for people she made food for all week, if she wasn’t being paid to do so? Guy deVillars sometimes came to watch the games, but never joined in, even though he was, according to his father, one of the stars of the school team. There was a picture displayed in the Big House: two rows of floppy-haired young men, one row standing behind their seated team-mates in front of a far grander pavilion than the one in the village. Guy was in the middle of the front row, holding a cricket bat, elbows on knees, his fringe falling over one eye, squinting into the sun. That was typical Guy, playing cricket for his fuck-off expensive school but refusing to lift a bat for his home town team.

That memory linked to another, a late summer’s evening, the year before Alice came. Will had been helping Marnie clean out the animals in Pets’ Corner. She was a hard worker but so small that it took her ages to fork the soiled straw into the barrow. After that it had to be pushed to the dung heap on the park’s far perimeter, behind a copse of trees and at a distance where its odours and the flies they attracted were unlikely to inconvenience the holidaymakers. Will had been manning the wheelbarrow, his hands hot inside a pair of leather gauntlets. Marnie was wearing a T-shirt with the cartoon of the holiday club’s motto, a cheerful piglet, the Severn Boar, on the front, and straining to carry a bucketful of water to top up the trough in the goat meadow. After her mother’s death, she became scruffy and unkempt but at the time of the memory Denise was still alive. Marnie’s hair was in pigtails and she’d been holding the handle of the bucket with both hands, her elbows locked, shoulders braced against the weight. In this awkward position she waddled, rather than walked, the bucket bumping against her knees and splashing water into her boots. The barrow wheel squeaked with each rotation and the straw smelled of ammonia and ponies. In the half-light, they spotted Guy deVillars coming out of the storage shed and hurrying across the mown grass towards the Big House.

Marnie and Will stopped to watch Guy ducking and diving into the shadows. ‘What’s he doing?’ Marnie had asked.

‘He’s been looking at his dirty magazines again,’ said Will.

‘His what?’