He trailed off, remembering too late that he’d never even opened the letters Marnie had painstakingly written to him, care of Durham University, never read a single one of them, never attempted to reply. It hadn’t been that he didn’t care, it was that he cared too much, that he was ashamed.

‘God, Marnie, I’m so sorry, I…’

She typed another message into the phone; held it up to him.

My dad thinks you killed Alice.

‘What? Jesus! No! No, Marnie, I swear I never… Guy was with her that night, you know it was Guy, I…’

She shrugged. It was meant to be a dismissive shrug, but it was too panicky for that.

She reached down, lifted the little dog into her arms, and hurried away.

If she hadn’t been so obviously frightened, Will would have gone after her. He was desperate to talk to her and to clear things up but the last thing he wanted to do now was make a horrible situation even worse.

19

Back at her own cottage, after Jenna had dropped the new dog off, a dear little lurcher called Luna, and when Luna was contentedly curled in a crate in the dining room, Marnie checked that all the doors and windows were locked and then herself settled amongst the cushions on the living-room settee, beside Lucy. The lamps were lit, the room was cosy, but the evening’s events had disturbed her greatly. She was anxious about what Camille deVillars had said. She felt as if the spirit of her mother’s unhappiness had been invoked by the old woman’s ramblings, confused as they were. She wished Will hadn’t come back.

She picked up her phone and, feeling as if she were somehow betraying Alice, searched for news. She found headlines, plenty of them, about the discovery of the bones, and a link to a report featuring the blonde journalist she’d met earlier. That link led her back to a copy of the original television broadcast of the appeal by Alice’s adoptive parents for information about the whereabouts of their daughter made after Alice went missing.

Marnie clicked on the link. There they were, stuck in the amber of a television report twenty-four and a half years earlier, in their old-fashioned clothes, Mr and Mrs Lang: Cynthia in a drab beige, belted dress, her frizzy brown hair permed in a style that must have been out of date even then, and Adrian in a loose shirt and trousers, a creased linen jacket, the pair of them being ushered, shuffling, into a room where a desk had been set up with microphones. As the couple made their way to their allocated seats, there was a barrage of clicking and flashes and Mrs Lang raised her hand to shield her eyes.