Marnie filled the pockets of her old coat with dog treats and poo bags, sorted her collection of leads, muzzles and harnesses and took the dogs out for a walk. Her intention was to go to her father’s bungalow to make sure he was all right, but when she reached the crossroads she couldn’t bear the prospect of having to run the gauntlet of angry retirement complex residents and possibly an upset warden as well as her father, hungover and bullish after the night before.

She wondered how her father felt about the police reopening their enquiry into Alice’s disappearance; now her murder. He’d been questioned twenty-four and a half years earlier and a combination of his looks, his arrogance, his refusal to respond in kind when asked a polite question and the fact that he had only recently lost a young and attractive wife, meant he had come across as dodgy, untrustworthy and predatory. Angharad had later told Marnie how the press had turned against John from the start. Angharad had been relieved because it deflected attention from Will, but angry on John’s behalf.

For the first days after Alice’s disappearance Marnie had been too sick to leave the caretaker’s cottage, but she wasn’t immune to the hurtful talk. The windows were open because of the heat and she could hear what people were saying outside. The travellers who walked by on their commute between the camp at Catbrain Point and the holiday park knew about Marnie, and kept their voices down, but the holidaymakers and police had no such compunction. Marnie heard the theories. She heard it said, more than once, that it couldn’t be a coincidence that John Morahan was connected to two women who were both gone from the same place within months of one another. For a long time after, Marnie heard the same theory repeated in the school playground and even amongst the travellers when they didn’t notice she was listening. There was speculation that John must have had something to do with his wife’s death, whispers about the way he’d treated her – wasn’t it odd that Denise was so rarely seen in the holiday park or the town? Why did she never come to staff parties, or seasonal celebrations? Wasn’t it obvious that she wasn’t happy, never had been? – and other rumours: that John had had his eye on Alice Lang, that he was a ladies’ man, that he’d fathered children he didn’t even know he had.

People whispered about Denise’s death but they fell silent when Marnie drew close. She learned enough to know that many believed her father had somehow contributed to it but couldn’t make sense of what she heard. Her mother had died of a weak heart, everyone knew that. How could that have been anything to do with her father?