The Langs were formally dressed, Mr Lang wearing a long woollen coat over his suit and his wife buttoned up in a navy coat with a scarf around her neck. She had faded over the past twenty-four years. She had been a strong presence – once she had thrown Will out of their house after he went to talk to them about Alice – now she looked like a frail old woman, her ankles thin, her legs little more than bone encased in American-tan tights, linking the space between her navy-blue shoes and the hem of the coat. She kept shooting nervous glances towards the media. Mr Lang was aware of her discomfort but clearly didn’t know what to do about it, and Jeremy was doing nothing to help his parents.

Guy deVillars assumed control. He stepped forward, took Mrs Lang’s hand, and lifted it almost, but not quite to his lips, and then he turned and reached out his hand to Mr Lang and they shook. Both men were wearing gloves. The clicking of cameras was frenzied.

After that, Guy held out an arm, inviting the Langs to step forward. Planks had been laid to form a pathway across the mud.

They didn’t go right inside the building site but stopped beside a small holly tree that had somehow survived the onslaught of the bulldozers and stood on a patch of raised ground. Mr and Mrs Lang stepped forward and Mr Lang laid the flowers at the base of the shrub. Mrs Lang put down her single rose and the couple gazed at this tentative shrine to the girl they’d adopted when she was a baby and struggled with from the day she was old enough to fight them until the day she disappeared.

Will didn’t doubt Alice’s descriptions of her troubled childhood: the parents she perceived as cold and unloving, her distress at their unwillingness to accept her as she was, their determination to make her conform to their idea of what she should be, their fear that she might turn out to be promiscuous, like her teenaged blood mother. When he was younger he’d despised the Langs. Now, having found out more about Alice and her demons, he had some sympathy for them.

They’d done the best they could. They had tried. Their ways were old-fashioned, perhaps they would even be considered cruel by today’s standards, but it was all they knew. Their approach had worked with Jeremy, who’d turned out exactly how they wanted. How were they to know it wouldn’t work with Alice?