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motivation.’
    ‘My husband teaches maths and physics,’ Clare said. ‘He doesn’t like to form opinions without evidence.’
    ‘My wife trained as a journalist and has always made up for my reluctance to speculate.’ He touched Clare’s shoulder with his bandaged hand. ‘You’ll understand
we’ve endured a decade of false dawns, Mrs Cooper. We have remained living in this village in the hope that if anyone does know what happened to our daughter, our constant presence will one
day prompt their conscience. We learned long ago to be patient, so you mustn’t feel under any obligation to us. I’m sure your job will be hard enough without any extraneous
pressures.’
    Jenny glanced into Clare Ashton’s eyes and saw she had no strength left to fight her corner. Her husband’s will had triumphed and drawn the life out of her. Jenny felt certain that
it was he who had purged the house of visual reminders of their daughter and stifled any thought of having another child. Photographs aged people and placed them and events in the past, where they
belonged; new lives displaced old realities as surely as dawn dissolved the night. It was plain to see: Philip Ashton wouldn’t move an inch until he had his answer, and if possible, his
revenge.
    Flecks of snow were slanting from a moonless sky as Jenny left the Ashtons’ cottage and picked her way across the common. The police vehicles had left and the bulldozer
stood silent, its folded arm partially illuminated by the single street lamp to the left of the razed house. She could see the lights of ten or so nearby houses, yet somehow their occupants felt
distant and indifferent. Whether it was an accident of geography or something in the landscape’s soul, she felt in her gut that Blackstone Ley was and always had been a private and a lonely
place.
    Eager to reach her car, she drew her arms tightly across her chest and quickened her step. As she walked the final yards, an uneasy sensation – she attributed it to drawing closer to the
ruin – caused her to glance along the margin of the woods on the far side of the road. For a fleeting second she thought she saw movement: a human silhouette against the hedgerow. Feeling
suddenly vulnerable, she fumbled for her keys with cold, clumsy fingers and hastily let herself into the Land Rover. She locked the doors and started the engine, telling herself her mind was
playing tricks. But as she turned her car around and her headlights picked out the tree trunks behind the pile of rubble, she was sure she saw it again: a figure vanishing into the trees.

SIX
    T HE RAW EASTERLY THAT HAD picked up in the late afternoon had blown away the fog but brought thickening snow flurries that by the time Jenny reached the
Severn Bridge were becoming a swirling blizzard. The few drivers foolhardy enough to make the crossing into Wales crawled slowly along the single open lane, uncertain of reaching their
destinations. A winter that had started early and bitterly in mid-November was biting deeper.
    Jenny tried to concentrate on the road ahead, but her thoughts kept returning to the village she had left behind. It was the story Clare and Philip Ashton had told her about Kelly’s former
lover, Darren Brooks, that was weighing most heavily on her mind. As the gossips would have it, when Kelly left Darren for Ed, Darren had continued to live in a house set back from the opposite
side of the common, and remained a rival for her affections. Jenny could see perfectly how that might happen. Country people born and raised in the same place weren’t inclined to move out and
move on. They’d sit and brood on the same hurt feelings for decades, and if they remained unresolved, even take them to the grave. She would have to find out the truth about the graffiti and
whether Kelly had been trying to move house. Perhaps Brooks had made a pass? Maybe Kelly had responded, or Ed thought she had. One thing of which she could be certain was that ten