On the road leading towards the Meoness community hall the torch was switched off. Perez found it more difficult to track the person then. If they stopped in the shadow, he might get too close and he didn’t want to give away the fact that he was following. Utra, the house where Sarah Malcolmson had grown up, appeared as an indistinct silhouette beside the track. Perez stopped and listened. Nothing. Now the footsteps were so far ahead that he could no longer hear them. There was another moment of indecision. Should he run on and try to catch up, or go inside? Polly was the most important person in all this. He still wasn’t sure whom he’d been following. This place was central in the Peerie Lizzie story, and Polly might have been attracted inside for another look. He pushed open the door.

In the old house the darkness felt viscous, like melted tar. Perez imagined that he would have to wade through it to get beyond the lintel. He turned on his torch and walked past the scullery to the bigger room and a smell of damp and decay. He was distracted, remembering his last visit to the house and the feral cat that had shocked Willow, the way her arm had felt under his hand, how the touch had been like an electric shock all the way to his shoulder. Then they’d both been disturbed and he thought they hadn’t searched the place properly. He was torn, aware that the figure he’d been following would soon be lost to him altogether, but curious. Something here had pulled in Polly Gilmour and Charles Hillier. He shone his torch into the corners. The room seemed quite bare. He opened the stove, which stood in one corner. A piece of half-burnt peat. Then as he was leaving he saw, caught on a sharp corner of the metal stove, a scrap of cloth. White. Like the dress worn by Peerie Lizzie every time she’d appeared. The dress, at least, was real and not imagined. In the dust on the floor he saw two long, thin rectangular shapes. Something had been placed here. Or lain here.

In the distance there was the sound of a car engine. Perez went outside, saw the headlights just before they were switched off and thought he could place them in Meoness with some accuracy. He ran down the track and away from the ruined house. As he was running his phone rang. He slowed to take it from his pocket, but continued walking fast.

‘Jimmy!’ Sandy had his panicky I’m out of my depth voice. ‘I’m just on my way back to Sletts and I heard a scream.’

‘From inside the house?’ He didn’t need to ask which house. He knew now where the focus of the investigation should have been from the start.

‘I’m not quite sure. From near the house at least.’