She held up a hand to warn him against coming closer and a terrible tension began to wrap around the two of them. God knows where it would have ended if they hadn’t been startled by a thin noise behind them, a ghostly wail coming from the holiday park. Will turned to see a pale figure moving amongst the machinery. It was a woman dressed in white, and the white caught the glow from the spotlights when she walked through their spill and then faded into the dark. Will’s heart raced, unsure if what he was seeing was human or spectral.

‘Alice?’ he murmured, wondering if it could be true, if his love was so powerful that her spirit had somehow been summoned from death itself. For a few moments he was entranced, giddy with hope. He was distracted by a pressure on his arm. Marnie was giving him the dog’s lead to hold; he took it. Marnie turned to the metal fencing that surrounded the park, she took a run at it and then, agile as a cat, she scrambled up and over, dropped down the other side, and ran across towards the ethereal figure. Will snapped himself out of his reverie. The woman in white, disappearing now into the darkness, was no ghost.

Will looked down at the dog, which panted and wagged its tail hopefully.

‘What the fuck is going on?’ Will asked.

He watched as Marnie followed the white woman into the gloom beyond the light cast by the security lamps and soon he couldn’t see either of them although he could still hear a faint crying.

Will could not climb the fence, certainly not with the dog in tow, so he retraced his footsteps, past the camera crews to the entrance to the park, ducked under the barrier and went inside, pulling the little dog on the lead behind him. He kept to the shadows to avoid the scrutiny of the assembled media and made his way to where the big earth-moving machines were parked, the buckets resting on the ground, the place where he’d last seen Marnie. He spotted her at last and slowed his pace.