John was a good mimic. Marnie could hear Edward deVillars speaking as her father spoke, she could imagine the old man’s apologetic, faltering manner.

‘He said one of the diggers had been uprooting a tree,’ John continued, ‘the body was beneath it. The roots had picked the bones apart so it’s a job to find them all. And he doesn’t think they’ll be able to tell what happened to the lassie, not now.’ John scratched his stomach viciously. ‘Poor kid,’ he said bitterly. ‘Poor kid. Twenty-three, she was. Twenty-bloody-three. She’s been dead longer than she was alive.’

What kind of tree, Marnie wondered, her mind focusing on this detail as the kettle began to puff behind her. She hoped it was a silver birch, or one of the ornamental cherries; something pretty and vibrant, a tree suitable for Alice.

John was still talking. ‘At least there’ll be no more nonsense about her walking into the estuary. Someone took that dress down to the river; someone led us all down the garden path.’ He pointed his finger at Marnie and wagged it. ‘My money’s on Angharad’s boy. I used to catch him outside that caravan all the time. I should’ve told the police. I didn’t, because of Angharad, but I should have.’

Marnie rinsed two mugs under the hot tap and placed them next to the kettle. Her father’s words were bringing back uncomfortable feelings. John Morahan wasn’t the only one who had lied.

She took a jar of Co-op coffee from the cupboard, spooned the granules into the mugs, filled the mugs with water.

John was still ranting. ‘Angharad, God love her, she’s a good woman, but she thought the sun shone out that lad’s arse. Even when I told her what he’d been doing that night, she was all: “Oh, well, boys will be boys,”. Truth is, he was so out of his mind he might’ve killed the girl and not even realised.’

Marnie thought of Will, sitting on her bed in the caretaker’s cottage, making her promise not to tell what he’d done.

John stubbed the end of his cigarette on the edge of an ashtray, tipping it, spilling old ash and crumpled fag ends on to the floor. Immediately he shook a new cigarette from a packet on the counter, put it in his mouth, struck the end of a tar-stained thumb against the wheel of a disposable lighter. Marnie closed her eyes. Take yourself away, she’d learned, when her throat became tight and breathing was difficult; go back to a time and a place when you were happy. When she was a child she used to collect lighters discarded in the holiday park. She liked their jewelled colours. She’d kept them in her secret cave, along with Alice’s tin.