Marnie had watched this same footage as a child on the television in the living room of the caretaker’s cottage where she was confined with the fever. She’d been sitting on the woolly orange rug with her dolls, two Barbies that had been left behind at the holiday park and a Tiny Tears that her mother had given her. The Barbies only had one outfit each, so Marnie had to improvise with scraps of fabric and safety pins. Her mother’s locket was open on the floor beside her, the twin pictures of Marnie as a tiny baby and as a toddler gazing up out of their frames.

She’d been alone in the cottage. John was probably over the road at the caravan park. But even if he’d been there, he would have let her watch the news. He hadn’t bothered to try to shield his daughter from the coverage of Alice’s disappearance; it never occurred to him that it might affect her. It wasn’t that he didn’t love her – Marnie had never doubted that – but rather that he was so wrapped up in his own emotional turmoil that he had no capacity left to consider anyone else’s.

Marnie had stopped playing with the dolls to watch the broadcast. Because of what Alice had told her about the Langs and the ways in which they used to discipline and try to control her, Marnie was predisposed to dislike the couple.

I wouldn’t put it past them to have kidnapped her themselves, one of the Barbies said to the other.

No, the second doll replied, it would be exactly the kind of thing they would do!

Watching the broadcast again as a parent, Marnie was more sympathetically disposed towards the Langs. They looked tired and distressed. What, as a child, she’d assumed was callousness in the stiffness of their demeanour, she now interpreted as shock. They were private people. Alice had told her as much. They didn’t like being the centre of attention. Their primary concern was to conform; to be seen as conscientious pillars of the Church and community in the rural Lincolnshire village where they lived. And here they were, thrown into the epicentre of a drama and a crisis, having to listen to a police spokesman report to the assembled journalists that there was evidence that sexual activity had taken place inside Alice’s caravan in the hours before she disappeared and that cannabis had been smoked. They hadn’t gone into the details of Alice’s troubled past then, but the Langs must have known it was coming. It was humiliating for them, and for Alice too, and for Alice’s memory. Marnie reached out her hand and took hold of Lucy’s warm foot. Lucy turned and smiled at her mother sleepily from behind a curtain of silky hair.

Marnie looked back to the phone’s small screen.