Holly rang Ben’s number every couple of minutes but there was never any reply, only the repeated click of the voicemail telling her that Ben was unavailable and that she should leave a message. Eventually that stopped, too. There was no return call from Tasha, either. Holly wondered about calling her grandparents in Oxford. They were much closer to Ashdown Mill and to Florence than she was, though the car was eating up the miles of empty road. The mesmerising slide of the streetlights was left behind and there was nothing but darkness about her now as she drove steadily west.

      In the end she decided not to call Hester and John. She didn’t want to give either of them a heart attack, especially when there might be no reason to worry. Even though she was furious with Guy, she knew he might be right. Ben could have returned by now and Florence might be fast asleep again and, with the adaptability of a child, have forgotten that she had even called for help.

      Holly had not wanted to call the police for lots of reasons ranging from the practical – that it could be a false alarm – to the less morally justifiable one of not wanting to cause problems for her brother. She and Ben had always protected each other, drawing closer than close after their parents had been killed in a car crash when Holly was eleven and Ben thirteen. They had looked out for each other with a fierce loyalty that had remained fundamentally unchanged over the years. Their understanding of each other was relaxed and easy these days, but just as close, just as deep. Or so Holly had thought before this had happened, leaving her wondering what the hell her brother was up to.

      She pushed away the unwelcome suspicion that there might be things about Ben that she neither knew nor understood. Guy had planted the seed of doubt, but she crushed it angrily; she did know that Ben and Tasha were going through a bad patch but she could not imagine Ben being unfaithful. He simply wasn’t the type. Even less could she imagine him neglecting his child. There had to be some other reason for his disappearance, if he had actually vanished.

      But there was Florence, who was only six, and she had been alone and terrified. So it was an easy decision in the end. Holly had called the local police, keeping her explanation as short and factual as possible, sounding far calmer than she had felt. If anything happened to Florence and she had not done her best to help, she would have failed Ben as well as her niece.

      The sign for Hungerford flashed past, surprising her. She was at the turn already. It was twelve minutes to four. Ahead of her the sky was inky dark, but in her rear-view mirror she thought she could see the first faint light of a spring dawn. Perhaps, though, that was wishful thinking. The truth was that she didn’t feel comfortable in the countryside. She was a city girl through and through, growing up first in Manchester and then in Oxford after her parents had died, moving to London to go to art college and staying there ever since. London was a good place for her glass-engraving business. She had a little gallery and shop in the mews adjoining the flat, and a sizeable clientele.

      At the motorway roundabout she turned right towards Wantage then left for Lambourn. She knew the route quite well, but the road looked deceptively different when the only detail she could see was picked out in her headlights. There were curves and turns and shadowed hollows she did not recognise. She was heading deep into the countryside now. A few isolated cottages flashed past, shuttered and dark. She took the right turn for Lambourn and plunged down into the valley, the car’s lights illuminating the white-painted wooden palings of the racehorse gallops that ran beside the road. The little town was silent as she wove her way through the narrow streets. As the stables and houses fell away and the fields rolled back in, Holly had the same feeling she always had on approaching Ashdown; a sense of expectancy she had never quite understood, a feeling of falling back through time as the dark road opened up before her and the hills swept away to her right, bleak and empty, crowned with a weathercock.

      She and Ben had raced up to the top of Weathercock Hill as children, throwing themselves down panting in the springy grass at the top, staring up at the weather vane as it pierced the blue of the sky high above. The whole place had felt enchanted.

      Ben. Her chest tightened again with anxiety. She was almost there. What would she find?

      The lights picked out a huge advertising hoarding by the side of the road. The words flashed past before she could make out more than the first few:

      ‘Ashdown Park, a select development of historic building conversions …’

      Trees pressed close now to the left, rank upon rank of them like an army in battle order. There was a moment when the endless wood fell back and through the gap in the trees Holly thought she saw a gleam of white; a house standing tall and foursquare with the moonlight reflecting off the glass in the cupola and silvering the ball on the roof. A moment later and the vision had gone. The woods closed ranks, thick and forbidding, swallowing the house in darkness.

      The left turn took her by surprise and she almost missed it even though she had come this way so many times before. She bumped along the single-track road, past a bus stop standing beside the remains of the crumbling estate wall. The old coach yard was off to the left; it seemed that this was where the majority of the building work was taking place, behind the high brick-and-sarsen wall. Even in the dark Holly could see the grass verge churned up by heavy machinery and the crouching shadow of a mechanical digger. There was another sign here, a discreet one in cream with green lettering, giving the name of the developers and directing all deliveries back to the site office on the main road.

      The lane turned left again, running behind the village now, climbing towards the top of the hill. A driveway on the right, a white-painted gatepost flaking to wood beneath and a five-barred gate wedged open by the grasses and dandelions growing through it.

       Ashdown