the lane that connected our row of houses with the main road. It should take about half an hour.
Glad to be outside, I set off at a pace. To my right were the houses of Mum and Dad’s neighbours. Identical seventies bungalows, each of their front gardens was perfectly manicured and littered with tasteful stone birdbaths. Before long, these began to peter out and the land opened up, revealing the fields and orchards beyond. A mile or so later I reached the stables where I used to go riding as a little girl. The horses were out in the pasture, tartan coats tied around their steaming bodies. I walked up to the fence and, after a short while, a brown mare came over to where I stood. She nodded her head and whinnied, wanting to be stroked. While I obliged, my palm smoothing down the soft white hair on her forehead, I watched one of the other horses eating apples that had fallen from a tree, his munching like that thuddy, dense sound boots make in fresh snow.
Still stroking the mare, I reached my other hand down towards my stomach and traced a finger across the new constellation of scars on my abdomen. Three small red dots. If you were to join them together with a pen they would form a kind of obtuse triangle.
I’d been out of surgery a few hours when Jason called Bullingdon’s to tell them I wouldn’t be in work for a while. During the course of the conversation it came to light I’d been fired. He waited till we got home from hospital to ask me about it. I’d apologised for keeping it from him. Told him I was embarrassed, that I’d planned on telling him once I had another job to go to and offered stories of unrealistic sales targets in explanation for my termination. My invalidity allowed me to hide behind a vague set of reasons and excuses I might not otherwise have got away with. It was clear Jason suspected there was more to it, but he didn’t push – for now, anyway.
It was dark when I headed back up the drive, to the bungalow.
‘There you are,’ said Mum before I was even through the door. ‘You’ve been gone ages. Are you sure you should be up and about?’
Her mouth dropped open.
‘Did you go out like that? In your nightie and dressing-gown? You must be freezing.’ Her gaze found its way to my feet. ‘But you haven’t got any shoes on either.’ I also looked down. She was right. My toes were covered in dirt.
‘I needed some fresh air.’
‘You must be starving,’ she said, hustling me into the kitchen. ‘I’ll warm up some leftovers.’
As I sat down, Dad looked up from his paper, his half-moon glasses low on his nose.
‘Hello darling.’ He looked at my muddy feet. ‘Go out for a little stroll, did we?’
My dad. Lauren had adored him. She loved nothing more than climbing up onto the round of his belly and tickling him under the arms with her tiny hands. When she was kidnapped he went for three days without sleep – mobilising local search parties, liaising with the police and going door to door with her photo – before finally collapsing with exhaustion. He’d been a civil engineer at a good firm in town. But, after the court case, he’d taken early retirement and now he spent his days pernicketing with his lawn, in constant battle with the slugs that plagued his vegetable patch.
The man who murdered my daughter, my father’s granddaughter, was called Gavin Nunn. The day he took Lauren he already had three previous sex offences to his name. Lauren was his fourth. We don’t know how he persuaded her to leave the front of our caravan. He might have promised her something; he might have grabbed her against her will. We do know that he took her to his car and that he then drove her to a number of different places where he raped her and then strangled her to death.
Ten days later a couple walking their dog discovered her corpse in a wood.
Mum put some reheated roast dinner on the table but I wasn’t hungry and, after a few mouthfuls, I couldn’t eat any more. While Dad cleared my plate, Mum came and sat next to me. I realised that she was balancing something on the flat of her hand.
‘I was having a clear-out earlier. You’ll never guess what I found.’