Worried about being caught for underage drinking, they didn’t come forward until a week later, when two other girls went missing from the area, right around the same time that Hollie disappeared. They provided a generic description of the man in the pub – dark-haired, about six foot, in his late twenties – but given the fact that it’s a week later and they had spent that night drinking, anything more detailed would be questionable. Apparently, he plied them with drinks he may have spiked – one of the girls described herself as feeling dizzy and faint – before the other girl read the text and got them out of there. All they knew about the party he invited them to was that it was that same night, at a house in Abingworth.

Operation Rainbow has been running for the last two years, since photographs of abducted teenagers started appearing on online porn sites, weeks after they’ve disappeared. Unfortunately, most of them have never been found.

It’s crossed my mind more than once since Hollie was found that her death might be connected. Maybe she stumbled across some information she shouldn’t have? Or said the wrong thing to the wrong person?

Reading through the notes again, I sigh. We have to be missing something.

*

At home that night, I close the curtains and light the fire. Apart from the crackle of the flames, the house is quiet in a way that takes getting used to after ten years of marriage. So does the reality that when you love someone, when they gradually start undermining you, shredding your self-esteem until you believe everything they tell you, it can be impossible to recognise that what they’re showing you is no longer love. It’s abuse.

Even now, it’s hard to shed the sense of shame I feel that I was a victim. Objectively, I know how it happens – the behaviour changes slowly, the episodes of cruelty followed by passionate declarations of regret and overblown apologies. He didn’t mean to hurt me … Anyone would want to believe the man they love simply made an error of judgement – none of us are perfect. We tell ourselves these and other lies while the vision of our pale, drawn faces becomes familiar to us, along with walking on eggshells to tiptoe around the next explosion. And as we gradually withdraw from life, the light slowly fades from our eyes.

Getting up, I go to the kitchen and pour myself a glass of wine.

And for some reason, I think of Elise Buckley.

Chapter Eighteen

Elise