The Cruellest Game

Thirteen

Tom and Eddie arrived promptly at eight in the morning, just as they’d said they would, even though it was Sunday. It was undoubtedly the coldest morning of the season so far. There had been signs of a frost early on, now being washed away by freezing rain.

‘Us ’ave ’ad our Indian summer all right, proper damned winter this be,’ said Tom by way of greeting, rubbing his big hands together.

I was already dressed and ready to leave the house. I’d checked out Robert, both as Anderson and Anderton, on the Net the previous evening, but not really got anywhere. However, I had made some progress in other directions, and I did have a plan for my day.

My school bag was by the front door. In it were my iPad, my phone, Robbie’s retrieved camcorder, my digital radio, all my credit cards and bank information, and a few other treasured items, like the diamond engagement ring which was just about the only thing I’d inherited from my mother.

I was taking no further chances. Even with my flash new burglar alarm system.

I told Tom and Eddie I just couldn’t bear to stay in the house any longer.

‘I need a break,’ I said, pushing my arms into my best Barbour.

‘I’m sure you do,’ agreed Tom sympathetically. ‘Look, if you want somewhere to go and someone to lend an ear, you could do worse than call in on my Ellen. Er’s ever so good at thigee sort of thing...’

I cringed inside at the thought. Tea and sympathy with one of the biggest gossips in the village, albeit that she may well be a kind woman, was the last thing I wanted.

‘I don’t know what I’m going to do or where I’m going to go,’ I told Tom. ‘But I think I need to be on my own for a bit.’

I handed Tom the key to the front door.

‘Shut Florrie in the kitchen and make sure you lock up and set the alarm system when you leave,’ I instructed him, adding my thought of the previous day. ‘Even if it does appear that the horse has already bolted.’

I couldn’t help feeling uneasy, but surely if there was anyone I could still trust, it had to be Tom Farley, I thought, as I jotted down the alarm code for him and showed him how to programme it so that Florrie wouldn’t set it off.

I’d considered taking her with me. But even Florrie seemed like too much trouble.

‘Us will, and don’t you worry about nothing, Mrs Anderson,’ said Tom, letting the sentence tail away a bit as he probably realized what a ridiculous thing it was to say to a woman in my situation.

I got in the car, switched on the engine and took a deep breath.

It was certainly true that I needed to get away from Highrise for a bit. But I was also on a mission. I had 192.commed Sue Shaw’s family and found them quite easily. Because Conor Shaw was one of my pupils, I’d already known they lived in Okehampton, but not their address. Sue’s father had introduced himself as Michael Shaw. And he’d popped up on the Net in Manor Road. Other occupants Susannah J. Shaw, Conor H. Shaw and Susan P. Shaw. Quite obviously the family I wanted.

There was a company director’s report too. It seemed that Michael Shaw was in the business of manufacturing garden sheds and summerhouses.

I’d decided I was going to confront him and his daughter. There was something they weren’t telling me, I was sure of it. And I was determined to give it my best shot to find out.

I drove to Okehampton slowly through horizontal freezing rain. None the less, I arrived in the moorland market town well before nine, and even in my state of manic distress mixed with fervent impatience I realized it would probably be counterproductive to knock on anyone’s front door uninvited at that hour on a Sunday morning.

A rumble in my tummy reminded me that it was probably the best part of twenty-four hours again since I’d eaten anything worth mentioning, so I found a cafe and ordered scrambled eggs, bacon, toast and coffee. Once more I was surprised by how good food tasted even though I had so little desire for it. Bacon and eggs anyway.

I dawdled over my breakfast, and by the time my satnav had found 14 Manor Road the rain had stopped and it was just gone ten.

I didn’t allow myself to hesitate. I parked, marched up the short garden path to a neat semi-detached house, and rang the doorbell. Sue Shaw answered the door. She wasn’t yet dressed. She wore a pink dressing gown over matching pyjamas and slippers pretending to be toy rabbits. Her fair hair, hanging lank and unwashed, framed a pasty yet still pretty little face. She looked shocked to see me.

‘Dad’s not here. He and Mum went early to take Gran her shopping. I can’t let you in, he wouldn’t like it...’ she stumbled, spots of colour rising in her cheeks, just as at Robbie’s funeral.

‘Of course you can,’ I said, sweeping past her in what I assumed to be the general direction of the living room. ‘I’m your boyfriend’s mum, after all.’

I was aware of her shutting the front door and following in my footsteps. I hadn’t left her much choice.

A boy’s voice called from upstairs. Almost certainly Conor Shaw.

‘Who’s that, Sue?’

‘Mind your own,’ she responded.

I rounded on her at once, aware that being able to confront her alone, at first anyway, could well work to my advantage. She looked vulnerable. She clearly was vulnerable. And I didn’t care. I was going to take full advantage.

‘You obviously wanted to tell me something more when you came up to me at the funeral,’ I began. ‘What was it?’

She shook her head and mumbled something.

‘Sorry?’ I queried sharply.

She repeated herself just a little more clearly.

‘Nothing.’

‘I don’t believe you, Sue. You really wanted to tell me something, then thought better of it. Tell me now. You know you want to. Is it something you think I should know about? Something about Robbie?’

Sue looked as if she might burst into tears.

‘N-no,’ she stumbled. ‘Well, yes. Sort of.’

‘So tell me. You’ll feel better. You know you will.’

‘I can’t. Dad said I mustn’t. He said I’ll ruin...’

Sue paused. I waited.

‘He just said I mustn’t tell anyone, that’s all,’ Sue continued.

Neither of us had sat down. We stood facing each other in the centre of a small square room, its very modern black-leather sofas and chairs lining cream walls scattered with reproduction oil paintings in big gilt frames.

The girl’s lips were trembling. She didn’t look well. There were dark shadows beneath her eyes.

Suddenly a bloody great light bulb exploded in front of me.

‘You wanted to tell me you were pregnant, didn’t you?’ I almost shouted the words. She recoiled from me, and started to cry.

‘It’s all right,’ I said, aware that it was anything but, making my voice as near to reassuring as I could manage. ‘It’s all right. That’s it, though, isn’t it? You wanted to tell me you were expecting a child and that Robbie was the father, didn’t you?’

She just carried on crying, her shoulders heaving.

‘Didn’t you?’ I repeated, still trying desperately to sound reassuring.

Sue Shaw nodded. ‘Y-yes,’ she said.

I found that my breath was coming in short sharp gasps. I hadn’t expected this in a million years. Maybe I should have done, but I hadn’t. After all, Robbie had been a quiet studious boy, though what I thought that had to do with teenage sex drives I had no idea. He’d also been a sensible boy. Surely he would have taken precautions? Obviously not.

I made soothing noises in the general direction of sobbing Sue Shaw, standing trembling before me in her girly nightwear and silly slippers, so young, so pretty, so distraught, and so bewildered.

I encouraged her to sit with me on the sofa, and put my arm around her. After a bit she quietened.

‘Did you love him, my Robbie?’ I asked softly.

‘Oh yes,’ she said, her blue eyes very wide.

‘And did he — do you think he loved you?’

‘Oh yes,’ she said again.

‘Did he know? Did Robbie know you were carrying his child?’

She nodded through the last of her waning tears.

‘I told him that morning, the day he died...’

She sniffed hugely, and I was afraid the tears were going to start flowing again before they had even properly stopped.

‘It’s all right,’ I repeated, wishing I could think of something better to say.

‘Did... did you see him that day then?’ I asked, wondering if the enormity of the question would hit her. It didn’t seem to.

‘No. I phoned him, right after I did the test. He was shocked, of course. I mean, we’d only done it about three times altogether, and only once without...’

She stopped. Colouring up again. Embarrassed by her own words. After all, I was Robbie’s mum.

‘Please tell me,’ I coaxed. ‘I want to know everything, everything you can tell me. It could be very important.’

She shrugged.

‘We only ever did it once without proper precautions, the first time,’ she went on. ‘We hadn’t meant to, you see. We hadn’t meant to do it. Swimming was cancelled suddenly because there was something wrong with the pool. We went off for a walk over the fields. It was September. The weather was so warm then, do you remember?’

There was a faraway note in her voice. She looked directly at me.

‘I remember,’ I said.

She nodded.

Without actually having said so, she left me in little doubt that she had been a virgin when she and Robbie first made love, in the open air it seemed, and I rather surprised myself with my next question.

‘Was it, was it what you expected, what you wanted?’ I asked. ‘Was it special?’

‘Oh yes, it was special.’ Briefly her face lit up, then clouded over again, as if remembering what had then transpired.

‘So when you told Robbie, what happened?’ I pressed. ‘I mean, did he have any idea before your test? You obviously did.’

‘I did, but he didn’t,’ she said. ‘I didn’t want to tell him, or anyone, anything until I knew for sure. I got one of those test kits from the chemist, you know, and that was it. There wasn’t any doubt.’

‘So what did he say?’

‘I don’t know really. Sounds silly, but I don’t properly remember. He didn’t say a lot, I don’t think, he just sounded shocked, and, well, I was, too...’

‘Didn’t you arrange to meet? Surely you would have wanted to meet, to talk it all through properly?’

She nodded again. ‘We did want to, of course we did,’ she said. ‘But, well, Dad overheard my call, you see, and once he’d heard enough he just marched into my room, grabbed my phone and switched it off. I was at home studying for the mocks, like Robbie. I didn’t realize Dad was in the house. He’d come back from work because he’d forgotten something. I think he listened in deliberately. I knew he’d been suspicious; he’d kept asking me what was wrong with me. When he realized he went ballistic. He has such a temper on him, I thought he was going to hit me. He didn’t, though. He just said that was it. I was going to do what he said and what he wanted. And I was never to have anything to do with Robbie again.’ She paused.

‘But Robbie didn’t know any of that presumably?’

She shook her head.

‘No. I’m sure he would have tried to call me back, but I didn’t even have my phone. Dad took it from me.’

She turned away from me a bit as if she didn’t want me to see her face.

‘I keep thinking it must have been my fault that he... that he did what he did,’ she said. ‘Could learning I was pregnant really have upset him that much? Could it?’

‘No, no, I don’t believe it could,’ I told her honestly. ‘There had to be something more.’

‘I wanted to speak to him, honestly, to talk about what we were going to do; us, not my dad. I so wanted to see Robbie,’ she continued, almost as if not having heard what I’d said. ‘But Dad grounded me. I had no phone, no money, no nothing, and he told me if I stepped foot outside the front door, he’d throw me out for good...’

She stopped, seemingly unaware of the impact of her words.

Another light bulb lit up before me, almost as spectacularly as the previous one.

‘Sue, where did your father storm off to?’ I asked.

‘Well, I’m not sure, not really sure...’ she began.

‘I think you are, Sue,’ I said. ‘He went to see Robbie, didn’t he? The father of your child.’

She nodded.

‘Tell me, Sue, please tell me. Robbie is dead. Anything you know about what happened on the day of his death could be so important.’

She nodded again. ‘He told me he was going to see Robbie, yes, t-to sort him out, he said.’

I felt my whole body trembling. Could this be it? Could this be what lay behind my boy’s death? An angry dad berating the teenage father of his teenage daughter’s unborn child? Could that have been enough to tip my Robbie over the edge?

Sue started to weep extravagantly again, her shoulders heaving, her face blotchy and distorted. I wanted the rest of the story, but first I had to calm her down.

‘Hush,’ I murmured gently. ‘Hush. You must try to keep calm. You’re pregnant.’

It seemed I’d unwittingly said just the wrong thing. Sue jumped to her feet, screamed once piercingly, and then yelled at me through her tears.

‘Oh no, I’m not. No, I’m damned well not. Not any more. Dad saw to that.’

My jaw dropped. I was just wondering if I dare ask another question without sending her totally hysterical when the sitting-room door opened and in walked Michael Shaw with, I assumed, his wife.

Sue Shaw screamed once more then ran past her parents out of the room and up the stairs.

‘Leave me alone, just leave me alone,’ she yelled over her shoulder.

‘What the hell’s going on, woman?’ Michael Shaw asked me angrily. ‘What the hell are you doing in my house?’

‘I would have thought that was pretty obvious under the circumstances,’ I responded, not even entirely sure what I meant by the remark.

But Michael Shaw seemed to think about it for a moment or two. Then his belligerence fell away a little. His shoulders dropped and his voice was quieter when he next spoke.

‘Well, you’ve really gone and upset our Sue now, haven’t you?’ he said.

‘It seems to me you’ve already done that yourself,’ I countered.

I felt a cold fury enveloping me. I rose to my feet and squared up to him. He towered above me. I’d guessed he was a big man when I’d first encountered him sitting in his Range Rover, and he certainly was big. I thought he was probably six foot four, or even five. Taller than Robert certainly, and far broader. I didn’t care.

‘After all, you’re the one who forced her to have an abortion, aren’t you?’ I yelled at him. ‘It was you who made my son’s fifteen-year-old girlfriend abort his baby. You, you bastard. And it’s quite likely you’re responsible for my son’s death too, as well as the death of his unborn child. You went to see him on the day he died. What did you say to him? What did you do to make my son want to kill himself? Or maybe I should be asking what you did to make it look as if he’d killed himself? I think you could have killed my son. Perhaps you’re a murderer. You evil, evil bastard.’

My level of hysteria now left Sue Shaw’s earlier outburst in the starting stalls. I was boiling with rage and despair. I was in a frenzy that was quite off the planet.

Michael Shaw, big as he was, looked as if he’d been poleaxed. He sat down with a bump on the edge of the sofa, long legs akimbo, thick arms hanging loosely.

‘Whoa,’ he said. ‘Whoa. I didn’t murder anyone. I didn’t hurt your son. I never even saw him...’

‘You lying evil bastard—’ I began again.

This time he shouted over me.

‘Will you just listen to me, Mrs Anderson. I went to your house, but I didn’t see your son because he was dead when I arrived. The front door was on the latch. I thought the boy was avoiding me. I was angry, all right, yes. I stormed right through the place looking for him. And when I found him, in his room up at the top, well, there he was, hanging by the neck. I took off back home, trying not to touch anything, left the door on the latch again, wiped the handle with a tissue. I don’t know what I was thinking about—’

‘So why didn’t you call the police?’ I asked, my voice still raised. ‘If that’s how it was, and you found a dead body, the body of my son, why the hell didn’t you call the police?’

Shaw shrugged. ‘I — uh, I realized how it would look, I suppose. I just didn’t think. I just wanted to get out of the place, back to my daughter.’

‘Oh yes,’ I continued at full pitch. ‘The fifteen-year-old girl you then made have an abortion. An abortion at that age, for Christ’s sake!’

‘No, no,’ said Shaw emphatically. ‘My God, where did you get that idea from? What sort of a man do you think I am? I didn’t make her have an abortion.’

‘Well, she’s not pregnant any more is she? And she’s just told me it was your fault, you bastard. You utter bastard.’

‘Mrs Anderson,’ the woman with Shaw, whom I’d already assumed to be his wife, blonde and pretty like Sue, but shorter, indeed not much taller than me, stepped forward and spoke for the first time, ‘I’m Sue’s mum. And you really must calm down and listen to me. Sue hasn’t had an abortion. She suffered a miscarriage on the night of your son’s funeral. She was only just pregnant, of course, but that made no difference. The poor love’s been beside herself ever since. We can’t do a thing with her, to be honest. She blames her father because they had a such terrible row when she came back from Robbie’s funeral. He’d forbidden her from going, you see. Sometimes, well...’

She glanced quickly towards Michael Shaw, who was sitting staring down at his feet.

‘My Mikey’s a wonderful family man but he doesn’t always think things through,’ she continued.

And that was what I was afraid of, I thought. But I made myself stay silent, albeit with some difficulty. I needed to hear the rest of this.

Mrs Shaw glanced towards her husband. He took up the story.

‘I blame myself too, if you want to know,’ he said. ‘I felt it was the boy’s fault my girl got pregnant. We blokes do. Him being dead didn’t change that. And I didn’t want our Sue to have anything to do with the lad’s family, with your family. I thought she’d get mixed up with the suicide thing, that fingers would be pointed at her. Her life was suddenly in enough of a mess. So much promise. I was afraid it was all going to be ruined, and I didn’t know what to do about it. When I realized she’d disobeyed me and gone to the funeral, I was hopping mad. We had a right shouting match, Sue and me, when she got back. Then, well, she just collapsed. And that was that. She lost the baby later that night.’

There was total silence in the room. I felt weak and drained. I sat down again in one of the leather armchairs and Mrs Shaw sat on the other. We were all sitting now.

I struggled to control my breathing.

‘I don’t know what to believe,’ I said.

‘It’s the truth, all of it,’ said Susannah Shaw.

‘You don’t know that,’ I snapped back, recovering some of my spark. ‘You weren’t with your husband when he drove to my home to confront my son, were you? You weren’t with him when he claims to have found my Robbie already dead, were you?’

‘No, I wasn’t with him,’ said Mrs Shaw mildly. ‘But I know my Mikey. He’s telling the truth. He has a temper, but he’s not a bad man. He’d never have hurt your son, not really, no more than he would hurt our Sue.’

I clenched my fists to stop my hands shaking. The revelations of the last few minutes had completely bowled me over. I wasn’t angry any more. In a way I was deflated. I didn’t know what to do or say next.

‘I think the police had better decide that, don’t you?’ I said eventually. ‘Obviously I shall pass on what you’ve both told me.’

Mr and Mrs Shaw exchanged glances again.

‘You must do what you feel you must,’ said Mrs Shaw. ‘But I promise you that the results of any police investigation will be exactly as my husband has told you.’

‘He discovered a dead body and failed to report it,’ I said. ‘I don’t have any choice.’

Mr Shaw lowered his head and stared at his feet again. Mrs Shaw stood up. ‘Go and put the kettle on, Mikey,’ she said. ‘I’ll pop upstairs and see to our Sue.’

I should have left then, I suppose. But I didn’t. It was as if I hadn’t the energy to do so. I was running on empty. Michael Shaw obediently began to do his wife’s bidding. I sat and waited while he clattered about in the kitchen next door and his wife got on with whatever seeing to Sue entailed.

The big man returned balancing an incongruously delicate china tea set on a tray: teapot, matching milk jug, sugar bowl, and proper cups and saucers.

He poured and passed me a cup, milk already in. I added sugar in spite of disliking sugar in my tea. If there was just a chance that there really was any substance to the old adage I had always been so scornful of, that sweet tea was good for shock, then this time I really had to give it a go, because I was quite numb with shock yet again. And I had to drive home.

Mrs Shaw returned as I was forcing down the first sickly mouthful. Michael looked at her enquiringly.

‘She’ll be all right. She’s calmed down. Gone on her computer. Best leave her alone for a bit.’

Michael Shaw nodded. His wife stepped towards me, with surely genuine compassion in eyes that were so like her daughter’s.

‘You know, I really am sorry about your son,’ she said.

I looked away from her. What did she expect me to say?

‘And I’m even more sorry if my family has done anything to make it worse,’ she continued, flashing a sharp look in the direction of her husband.

I still didn’t reply.

We sat together awkwardly with little or no conversation. There was, however, one remaining question I needed to know the answer to.

‘Where were you on Friday, Mr Shaw?’ I asked abruptly.

‘On Friday?’ he queried, sounding puzzled. ‘At work, of course. As usual. Why?’

‘Because somebody broke into my home and wrecked the place,’ I replied in a level sort of voice.

‘And you’re accusing me of that, now?’

‘No,’ I said. ‘I just wanted to know where you were when it happened, that’s all.’

‘You’ve got no bloody right—’ Michael Shaw began, his voice raised.

‘No, Mikey,’ his wife interrupted him. ‘Mrs Anderson has just lost her son. That gives her the right to ask almost anything, in my book. And on top of that she says her home has been trashed. Just tell her you didn’t do it. That’s all.’

‘Of course I didn’t bloody well do it,’ said the man. But his voice was no longer so harsh.

‘I’m sorry you’ve had that to put up with as well, Mrs Anderson. However, I can assure you it’s got nothing to do with this family,’ said Mrs Shaw, managing to sound both gentle and assertive.

She was quite convincing. But I didn’t know whether or not I was convinced. Not by so much of what I had heard. I did know I really couldn’t stay with the Shaws any longer. I abandoned the remains of my sweet tea and left.

Mrs Shaw escorted me to the door.

‘Are you going to the police?’ she asked, as we stood together in the hall.

‘What do you think?’ I responded.

Once back in my car I started the engine immediately and drove to the end of the road and round the corner until I knew I would be out of sight. Then I stopped again, and slumped forward over the steering wheel. Had I already solved the mystery of my Robbie’s death? And if so, if I really believed that Michael Shaw was responsible in some way, then why on earth had I sat in his house drinking tea with the man?

The truth was that I still didn’t know what to believe. That scenario just seemed too simplistic somehow. And Shaw? He might well be the sort to lash out in the pub or on the street, but was it likely that he was a murderer? And was it remotely likely that he had the psychological make-up of a man who could effectively incite another human being to suicide?

I suppose that by staying with the Shaws for as long as I did, I’d perhaps hoped that something would present itself to answer those questions. It hadn’t.

One thing was certain though. I was definitely taking this new information to the police. At the very least, surely, it was enough to make them conduct further investigations into Robbie’s death. Then I thought about exactly how I was going to approach the Devon and Cornwall Constabulary. My two local bobbies seemed to think I was a lunatic. DS Jarvis had made it quite clear he was involved with a much more pressing case, and I could hardly disagree with that, if only on the grounds that little Luke Macintyre might still be alive and my Robbie was not. I considered driving into Exeter straight away and taking my chances with the front office staff at Heavitree Road. But, of course, that Sunday everyone on duty was likely to be totally preoccupied with the case of the abducted three-year-old. Nobody was going to have much time to spend dealing with someone half the force seemed to have already dismissed as a madwoman, were they?

I thought for a moment or two more. Then I made a decision. I would leave it until the morning, then I would drive to Exeter. On a Monday morning staffing at Heavitree Road would be at full strength, and surely not everyone would be assigned to the Luke Macintyre investigation. In any case, it was even possible that the little boy might have been found by then. Yes, I would go to Exeter’s premier police station and I would ask to speak to a senior CID officer. And maybe, just maybe, I would be seen by someone who would listen to me.

Feeling very slightly better at having made even that much of a decision, I checked my watch. More time had passed than I’d thought, both at the Shaws and sitting in my parked car using my steering wheel as a pillow while trying so desperately to gather my thoughts. It was nearly midday. I didn’t want to encounter Tom and Eddie again, or indeed anyone else, that day, but they should be well gone by now.

Just in case, as a further delaying tactic, I made myself stop at Waitrose, on the edge of the town. I loaded a much-needed starter pack of plain white crockery into a trolley — four mugs, four dinner plates, four tea plates and so on; and also a couple of packs of cheap glasses — four tumblers and four wine goblets. I also bought milk and fresh bread, more eggs and bacon, which seemed to be the only food I even half wanted to eat, and a couple of bottles of malt whisky, an even more effective anaesthetic than copious quantities of red wine, I’d found.

I shivered as I packed my purchases into the back of the car. It had stopped raining, for the moment, but this iron-grey day remained without doubt the coldest of the autumn. As Tom Farley had remarked, it had a real wintery feel. And there was a bleakness about it which totally matched the bleakness that now engulfed my heart.

I started the engine and headed for home. Or, rather, the place that had once been my home.

I turned into the lane leading to Highrise with caution, letting the engine of the Lexus slow to the point where the electric motor kicked in so the car made virtually no noise at all. Tom and Eddie’s white van was no longer parked in the yard. I had been sure it wouldn’t be, but hadn’t felt like taking any chances. If the two of them had still been on my property, I would have reversed out of the lane and retreated to park up the road safely out of sight until they departed. After what I had been through with the Shaws I just couldn’t have faced them. Or anyone else.

The spare key to Highrise was on the doormat, having obviously been put through the letter box as I’d instructed. And Florrie had been shut in the kitchen, also as instructed. She’d started to bark and cry as soon as I’d begun to unlock the front door, and I then took a few seconds to master the remote control I’d been given, not much bigger than a key fob, in order to deactivate my spanking new burglar alarm system. Indeed, I only just managed to programme the thing into submission before it contacted its monitoring centre, which would cause God knows who to descend on me.

Florrie greeted me with her usual enthusiasm and then began whining pitifully at the back door. Of course, the poor creature must be desperate to get into the garden. I had omitted to give Tom and Eddie any instructions to let Florrie out, and I was quite sure they wouldn’t have done so without my say-so. I unlocked and opened the door. Florrie ran straight onto the lawn and crouched down. I shrugged my arms out of my Barbour, then stood with the door open expecting her to return straight away. On such a cold day Florrie rarely spent more time than necessary outside.

Instead she continued to run around the lawn whining. Once or twice she paused, ears pricked as if listening to something. I listened too and could hear nothing. But as a dog’s hearing is supposed to be more than three times as sensitive as human hearing I suppose that wasn’t surprising.

Ears still pricked, she scampered to the five-bar gate leading into our paddock, then back to me, and back to the gate again. I called her. She ignored me. Instead she wriggled under the gate and into the paddock. I watched as she ran to the old stables just to the left of the gate and began to bark quite ferociously. Then she turned again towards the garden and seemed to bark directly at me, before scurrying back to the stables. I thought possibly a fox had got in there, or that it could be rats disturbing her. Or, Florrie being Florrie, it could even be that her ball had become trapped in there somehow and she couldn’t get to it.

‘Come in, you stupid creature,’ I called.

But Florrie, every muscle quivering, was now sitting bolt upright by the paddock gate looking at the old stables and whimpering. She was behaving very strangely.

‘Oh, all right,’ I capitulated. ‘You win as usual.’

I walked across the lawn, shivering as I’d already removed my coat, and pushed the gate ajar a foot or two. As I approached the stables I thought I could hear something too, a faint crying sound, but pretty much dismissed it as my imagination.

I pulled open the stable door, which took quite a lot of strength as it was one of the few things in and around Highrise that Robert had never bothered to keep in repair. Indeed, he’d been planning to knock the dilapidated old building down and replace it with a summerhouse and perhaps a barbecue area, as it stood in a corner of the paddock that caught the last of the evening sun setting over the moors.

‘We could make a sort of secret garden,’ he’d said, eyes alight with enthusiasm. I’d loved the idea. Not least because, although the term meant nothing to Robert who, like his son, was no reader, The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett’s tale of rebirth and healing in a beautiful forgotten place, had been one of my favourite books since childhood.

I shook myself. Those memories of a life I knew to be lost for ever just would not stay away. And they did me no good at all. I made myself turn my attention to the matter in hand.

As I stepped into the old stable everything seemed as normal. Inside, there was a defunct lawnmower Robert had said he would try to repair one of these days so that we had a spare, a few other bits of broken machinery, some leftover Delabole slate from when he had made the terrace at the front of the house, some timber left over from the gazebo, and a pile of fairly large pieces of oak, yet to be chopped into burnable size and transported to the log store nearer the house. They were the remains of an old tree, struck by lightning, which Robert had acquired from a neighbouring farmer after offering to pay to have it felled and taken away.

Florrie ran straight behind the oak pile, still whimpering, her tail wagging furiously. I followed her, and as I did so became quite sure that I could hear the faint sounds of some kind of living creature. I proceeded cautiously, afraid of what I might find.

If there was a wild animal in the stable, it must be injured or trapped or it would not have remained there as I approached. And a frightened wounded fox, or perhaps a badger, could be dangerous.

I tried to prepare myself. Nothing, however, could have prepared me for the shock of what I was about to discover behind that woodpile. I stood frozen to the spot for several seconds, unable to believe my own eyes.

A small child, bound hand and foot and apparently barely conscious, lay naked on a piece of soiled blanket.