Bea woke in the middle of the night. She didn’t know what had woken her. The white noise of the rain had stopped. She realised Dan was not in bed. Silently, she got up and opened the window. She lay and waited for him. The nightingale started to sing, chirps and gaps and trills. She listened to the patterns in the dark. Then Dan was next to her.

‘You’re dreaming. Go to sleep,’ he said.

Alex wasn’t there next morning. The hotel felt strange without him. Dan and Bea went to the cafe in Arnay for lunch and her parents went to a hotel.

He wasn’t back by four o’clock, and still not back for dinner. Liv sat at his computer in the hall, looking at Pinterest, and calling her friends.

‘Lolly! I’m in France. Yes, our project …’

Griff tapped out emails on his iPad.

‘He said he was going on an errand for you,’ said Bea. ‘What was it?’

‘He went to Mâcon.’

‘He should be back, shouldn’t he?’

‘Alex does this,’ Griff said. ‘He’s always done it.’

That night, Bea and Dan gave up on manners and ate dinner separately from her parents in their room, then watched a movie on Dan’s laptop in bed. The image kept freezing and the sound carried on without the picture. Alex’s phone was not answering.

‘You can’t say it’s not like him,’ said Dan.

Griff’s night-time walk was longer than usual, and when he came in they heard him arguing with Liv in their room across the corridor.

Bea fell in and out of sleep, with the sounds of their voices and the shifting noises above her in the roof spilling into her dreams in fragments. She dreamed of people talking, and places she had never been, then woke, then dreamed again, of the familiar and the strange, tainted by fear. And then the night was over, and she saw the beginnings of morning through the curtains and heard the birds. If animals were awake and it was light nothing bad could happen.

Gratefully, she fell into a deep sleep, woken soon afterwards by the doorbell. First, she discarded the sound. It wasn’t hers. Then it rang again, and she thought Alex would answer it. It rang again, and she was suddenly awake. She got out of bed fast, pulling on jeans with the white T-shirt she slept in.

‘Dan?’ she said, but he didn’t stir, asleep on his back, oblivious.

She ran down the stairs, holding her hair off her face. Through the window she saw a police car, blue with yellow chevrons, parked at an angle across the gravel. She opened the front door to two gendarmes standing on the steps. One of them spoke to her.

‘Do you speak French?’