It was true that there was a stash of copies of Playboy, Penthouse and Men Only inside the shed. They’d been there for ages but Will had no idea who they belonged to or who had put them there. For all he knew, John Morahan might have found them around the camp and put them up on the high shelf out of reach, intending to burn them at some later date.

‘What’s a dirty magazine?’ Marnie persisted.

‘Nothing,’ said Will. ‘It’s nothing.’

But now he wondered about those magazines, wondered if they had belonged to Guy, if Guy did have some kind of perverse addiction, a distorted attitude towards women. He wondered if Guy had gone to Alice’s caravan that August evening all those years before and if his attempts to seduce her had gone wrong; if Guy had put a hand over Alice’s mouth to stop her screaming, if he’d held it there too long and then panicked when he realised what he’d done; if he had hidden her body and then made it look as if she’d drowned in the estuary.

13

After supper, Marnie decided to go to see her father. She didn’t know if he knew about the discovery at the holiday park, and whether he did or he didn’t, she needed to make sure he was OK.

Lucy was curled up on the sofa with Tessy, watching a teenage drama on her phone. She blew her mother a kiss goodbye.

Marnie’s cottage sat in the centre of a plot of land, an orchard of ancient apple trees, a pond with a willow praying over it, and a small paddock where Marnie kept her agility equipment. The stable where Scrumpy lived, together with a companion donkey called Seashell, opened into the orchard. Marnie checked on the animals before she left. Mister was asleep beneath the heater in the feed room.

Marnie set off alone, walking the empty roads to her father’s bungalow. She kept her eyes down, her hands in her pockets, moving quietly and lightly, like an animal that doesn’t want to draw attention to itself. Behind the curtains of the houses and bungalows in Severn Sands town, lamps glowed and television screens flickered. People were eating dinner off trays on their laps while they watched the news, hungry for details about the discovery at Channel View. Do you think it’s the girl who vanished? Who else could it be? Who would have thought such a thing would happen here? They were disinterring the old stories and rumours, dusting them off, hoping their pet theory would turn out to be the right one.