Now, as Marnie drew closer to the old entrance to the holiday park, a weed-infested shingle drive that ran beneath a dilapidated arch with the name of the park above it, she realised something was different. The jaws of the great earth-moving machines were motionless, their engines silent. The contractors in their high-vis protective workwear were gathered around a part of the site where the funfair used to be and there was an atmosphere of uncertainty, exacerbated by the quiet.

Marnie clicked her tongue and the dogs stayed close. Gabriel Romanescu, clad in high-vis workwear and a hard hat, mud clagging his boots, was standing next to a police car parked by the exit. A roll-up burned between his lips, one eye narrowed against the smoke. He was using both hands to compose a message on his phone. He looked up as Marnie approached and then looked down again.

Marnie stopped a few feet away from Gabriel. She didn’t have to speak for Gabriel to know that she was wondering what had happened, and why work had stopped.

‘I can’t tell you,’ he said, without taking his eyes off the phone. ‘It’s confidential.’

Marnie waited. Gabriel glanced at her, then back at the phone. He removed the cigarette, examined it and dropped it on the mud.

‘We’ve found some bones buried in the old funfair area,’ he said. ‘We think they’re human.’ He paused a moment, then corrected himself. ‘We can see that they’re human. But we’re not supposed to talk about it. All communications have to go through head office.’

Marnie was silent. The breeze blew cold from the estuary. She narrowed her eyes against it.

‘Let’s hope they are old bones,’ said Gabriel. ‘Let’s hope they’ve been there for hundreds of years. We’ve dug into burial grounds before. Once we found a prehistoric graveyard. The universities were all over it. We had to stop work.’

Marnie gazed past Gabriel into the holiday camp, and she could see it as it used to be: full of people, colour and noise; children playing cricket between the caravans, smoke puffing from barbecues, music singing out from transistor radios; laughter, screams and splashing from the swimming pool. She could see the young woman from Caravan 49, Alice Lang, walking towards her, wearing her lemon yellow sundress, the blonde hair with the dark roots pinned back from her face, the ribbons of her espadrilles making diamond shapes on her calves.