Marnie stood in the concrete yard outside the stables, filling water buckets from the tap that jutted out from the wall, trying not to splash her legs. How hot it had been that summer of Alice, how relentless the heat. She remembered how, a few days before Alice disappeared, her throat had become sore. It wasn’t too bad at first, but she kept pressing her fingers against her glands, trying to press them down. She remembered, one afternoon, spotting the familiar shape of her father at the far end of the holiday park. He was holding a hose and the water was arcing from its mouth, painting a silver half-moon against the deep blue sky. Children were playing, running around, screaming. The pitch of their voices became muddled with the white-hot dazzle of the sunlight on the hose-water and Marnie couldn’t differentiate between sight and sound, she felt so dizzy.

And the next moment, the ground fell away from beneath her feet as she was gripped by big hands, swooped into the air. It took only a moment for her to realise what was happening, but before that moment came she was panicked and the panic hadn’t left by the time she realised it was Will; that he’d grabbed her from behind and was swinging her around. She tried to kick him, but it was hard to kick backwards. She was too big for such horseplay now, but all her protest amounted to was an indignant croak.

Will eventually dropped her and she gathered herself together, and dusted herself down. Idiot, she was thinking, and worse; he was still laughing. If they hadn’t been on the holiday park, Marnie would have attacked him with her feet and fists. She enjoyed a good play-fight with Will, but there were holidaymakers around and it had been imbued in her since she was big enough to understand that she had to behave herself in front of the paying guests.

‘I want to show you something!’ Will had said, a big, good-looking teenager in his baggy shorts and scruffy T-shirt. He’d beckoned her off the main site into the service alleyway which ran behind the hedges. There were signs saying: ‘No Entry’ to keep the holidaymakers out so they didn’t see the staff moving laundry, gas bottles and waste bins, and using the alley as a shortcut around the park. He’d led her into the patchy shade beneath the old apple tree, where the air was a little cooler and she’d flopped onto the dusty yellow grass. Will had taken a box from his pocket and put it into Marnie’s hands, a white cardboard box with a pink silky bow on the top.