The landing was tiny, the carpet wrinkled, damp peeling the wallpaper from the walls, cobwebs in the corners. Marnie pushed the door to her old bedroom and it swung open. The furniture was still in situ: the white plywood wardrobe that Marnie had covered with stickers, the single bed with the pink velour padded headboard, frayed and worn now, damp stained. The wardrobe doors were warped; the room smelled of decay. Jesus was gone from the wall. John must have taken Him down at some point; he’d never liked having Him in the house. It was Denise who had insisted He be in Marnie’s bedroom, watching over her while she slept, keeping her safe from evil. Jesus had been another point of conflict between John and Denise.

‘What’s He ever done for you?’ John would ask when he caught Denise whispering a prayer. ‘How has He ever made you happy?’

Marnie sat on the mattress. She closed her eyes. She tried to feel something, anything. Alice, her mother, some clear, uncomplicated fact about the past. She remembered one winter when she was very small. The carousel had been dismantled for a service and her father had brought a large wooden horse into this bedroom, propped it against the wall. It had been a black horse, a galloper, wild red eyes, a flailing tail, its teeth bared.

But no, that was ridiculous. Her father would never have brought a carousel horse upstairs. He couldn’t have. They were too big and heavy and there was no reason on earth why he would have put one in his daughter’s bedroom.

Yet Marnie remembered creeping out of bed to go into the bathroom, she remembered the sound of hooves in the night, being terrified of opening her eyes because the horse was there, stamping its feet, blowing through its nostrils, threatening her.

It couldn’t have been!

It was a dream, she realised. She was remembering a dream!

God, what an idiot she was! What an absolute dipstick! She laughed at herself, dropped her head into her hands and rocked for a moment on the bed. Then, emboldened, she went into the main bedroom, her father’s room, previously the room that he used to share with her mother. As in the rest of the house, the large pieces of furniture were still in place but all the pictures, the knick-knacks, the personal items, were gone. She walked across to the chest of drawers, pulled open the top one. This was where her father used to keep his paperwork: manuals for the funfair rides, receipts, cheque books and so on. Some scraps of paper still remained. She flicked through them – nothing of note except for a small, square photograph, face down, at the bottom. She picked it up, turned it over. It was a picture of a young woman standing beside one of the carousel horses, holding onto the pole, leaning out towards the camera, smiling.